Hey, Stranger
by gimmeabreakxD
Summary: Theirs was love forged in iron and fire, tremulous at best, frayed at the seams, and falling apart where the grains of time had rubbed it raw. An accident knocks their little dysfunctional world off its only known axis, and they learn to fall in love all over again—the hard way, of course.
1. Blank

**Chapter One**

* * *

_Blank_

* * *

The first thing she knew was that she was floating on water.

The sky burned a blinding shade of forget-me-not, smeared and pockmarked with clouds of the purest white: the kind that etched static orange afterimages at the back of her eyelids whenever she closed her eyes. Below her, cool water danced and shifted and slipped between her fingers and toes the way only water could. She had to exert much effort to keep her head clear of the water level, and even then it had started to caress her cheeks and flood her ears.

She was floating on a lake, it seemed.

Chelsea turned her head to the right, ignoring the water sloshing in her ear. A dark line of trees—most likely the beginnings of a forest—stood beyond the lakeshore, its reflection upside-down on the undulating surface of the water. Past the trees was an impressive range of craggy mountains with snow-capped, foggy peaks: natural spires warring to stab the sky the deepest. From somewhere, she heard the chirping of birds.

There was a strange numbness around the back of her head and at the joints of her elbows. Even her fingers felt very stiff, the tautness stark against the yielding lake. She tried wiggling her toes; they wouldn't budge. It was then that it dawned on her: she couldn't move anything but her head. In her mind, she went over all the reasons why this realization was not a favorable one, and although the list was long, she felt nothing—no trepidation, no terror, not even the slightest trace of boredom.

She could have stayed and floated on the nameless lake for all eternity, or until her fingers turned to prune and her skin all wrinkly, like an old woman's.

It happened in an instant. Everything vanished. The sky disappeared, and so did the lake. The mountains, the trees, the birds' chirping—they all disappeared, without warning, sucked into the blackness that now replaced the scene; as if a metaphorical tablecloth had been yanked away from underneath her and took everything with it, leaving her behind. The rough transition jarred her senses; it was, in a word, disorienting.

It took her a few moments to realize that she had only been dreaming. For a few more moments, she hung suspended in the blurry limbo that served as a near-sentient border between sleep and consciousness. Distantly, she wondered if she was dead, and that if this was what dying was like, why she had never thought of trying it earlier. There was something oddly comforting about being disconnected from her own body; indeed, she had all but forgotten that she couldn't move. The thought brought an ironic sense of freedom, if not poignantly appropriate.

The limbo itself took whatever she knew about time and space and distorted it to the point of insanity. She could taste colors expanding and bursting, leaving a bittersweet aftertaste at the tip of her tongue. She felt the scent of daffodils and dried leaves smoothing out and flattening, folding over itself into a wiry strand of perfumed lightning. In the distance, she could see the sound of church bells rippling the air around it, rousing waves of concentric circles expanding infinitesimally, curling at the edges like burning paper.

And then, finally, she woke up.

She could hear muted voices, hazy at first, hushed and whispering, coming from somewhere she couldn't see. Even the simple act of opening her eyes caused some pain: a tiny prickly sensation just under her eyelids, more annoying than unbearable. What she saw at first didn't quite make sense. Everything was blurry and swam in and out of focus; something bright seared her entire vision, save at the edges. She blinked.

She was staring at a white ceiling.

Oddly, she found time to ponder whether the ceiling was leaning more towards off-white or a very light blue-gray, then reprimanded herself for losing focus. She had to find out where she was.

Chelsea sniffed once. The dry air reeked of something sterile, mingled with the distinct tang of antiseptic. The gears in her mind turned painfully slowly—she could have sworn it actually hurt physically—before coming to the conclusion that she was in a hospital somewhere, or a clinic, at the very least.

She gingerly tried to sit up and immediately regretted it as a sharp bolt of pain shot through her skull. The feeling was so intense that it whited everything out for a fraction of a second, before her eyesight restored itself as if nothing happened. The pain receded as abruptly as it came, but the memory of it made her more than a little careful as she kept edging forward—she was not going to lie down for a second more, not if she could help it. The expression "stubborn as a mule" crept its way to her mind.

She felt a tingle of pride, uncalled for as it was, when she succeeded in bringing herself up to a sitting position. Directly ahead was a white curtain that blocked the source of the whispering voices. There was no medical equipment in sight: no IVs, no dextrose, no machine she was hooked up to. She reached up to touch the sore spot at the back of her head and felt bandages—which spoke volumes about the pain. How long had she been out?

She tried to call out but what came out was little more than an unintelligible croak. Nonetheless, the people on the other side of the curtain heard it and the murmuring stopped. The curtain was briskly drawn aside and in strolled a man who had… _something_ strapped around his head, a pen in one hand and a clipboard in the other. There were three more people following in his wake, one man and two women.

"I'm glad you're awake, Chelsea," the man said. He wore a white coat, and a stethoscope was slung around his neck, swaying in accordance to his movements. "You've been out for quite a while. How are you feeling?"

"I—"

There were questions, so many questions she wanted to ask. If there was one thing she hadn't expected, it was to be asked anything. A stray thought streaked through the forefront of her brain, and caused a bubble of panic to rise unbidden. She forced it down, arguing that whatever happened, she would not break down in front of strangers. The bright lights made it difficult for her to think clearly; she was still groggy from the prolonged unconsciousness and it somehow warbled every sound. She winced—the pain in her head struck again, although not as intense as the last one.

"Chelsea?"

The doctor was staring at her, and so did the three people behind him. One was a woman whose blond hair was pulled back into a messy ponytail. She looked so nervous, Chelsea almost pitied her. The other woman, a brunette whose face had a soft, friendly quality to it, carried a clipboard of her own—a nurse, maybe, or the doctor's aide? The last one startled her: he was a man, tall and scowling, with an intense expression in his eyes as he watched her. They were strangers, the lot of them, and they were looking at her as if she was supposed to say something. But what was there to say? She remembered the doctor's question and decided to begin with that.

"I—" She broke off sharply. The knifing ache in her head bled away to a low, muted throbbing, the beats rolling out in waves from the back of her head spreading out to encompass the entirety of her skull. It was more manageable, but no less daunting. She saw the people shift uncomfortably.

"…my head hurts," she said finally. It came out frail and hoarse, her voice rasping with disuse. And then, deciding that she had earned the right to ask a question of her own, she added: "Who are you?"

She felt rather than saw it: everyone in the room tensed. There was a sudden hush, and if she looked closely, she could see the little things that proved it: the doctor's sharp intake of breath, the blond woman's nervous fidgeting, the other man's jaw working furiously, the brunette's eyes darting around. It was as if she had cursed the very core of their essence, as if she had mutilated an infant and laughed about it. Their faces made her feel like a student all over again, caught sneaking out of school by the schoolmaster himself.

She had said something terribly wrong, and for some reason, she didn't want to find out more.

The doctor was first to recover. "Tell me, do you remember anything?" he asked in a clipped, professional tone that managed to sound friendly at the same time. He drew nearer and bent over her. He seemed to be checking the bandages on her head—she wasn't sure at all.

The stray thought came back in full force. The only difference was that this time, she was forced to accept it. She prodded her mind, swiped inquisitive fingers at suspicious corners, inspected nooks and crannies for possible misplaced memories—names, faces, numbers, locations, anything—even going so far as to try and recall the date and place of her birth, but there was nothing. Her mind was a dark chasm, yawning indolently at all her efforts, with only her name bouncing around it and echoing in the void.

"No." She almost choked at the word.

She heard a feminine gasp from one of the women. It hit her in the face—she was supposed to know these people. They knew her, whether on a personal or a professional basis was not at all that difficult to discern. It was glaringly obvious from the hopeful expectation and trepidation in their eyes.

The surge of panic returned and clawed its way to her throat, where it lodged itself firmly no matter how much she swallowed. She found it was becoming increasingly difficult to breathe. Blinking back tears, she grabbed the blanket twisted around her legs and drew it to her, as if it could protect her from the harsh reality and the bemused stares of the strangers around her. If only.

The doctor didn't seem to be fazed by a panicked patient. He must have faced worse, she thought.

"Nothing at all?" He wrote something down on his clipboard and checked her pulse. "What about your childhood?"

She had to curb the urge to shout at the doctor in great frustration. She couldn't even remember, try as she might, where she currently resided. How could he expect her to remember her childhood? The question almost sounded like a taunt, sticking its tongue at her while wagging its fingers behind its head. Still, he was the doctor; he was the expert, and she, like it or not, was his patient.

She began by forcing her lungs to take deep, even, breaths. She figured no one, not even the most intelligent person in the world, would be able to think clearly through an almost panic attack. _In through the nose, out through the mouth._ It helped more than she thought it would—it managed to slow her heart rate down, for starters. The shock and fear of remembering nothing still lurked in there somewhere, but its presence was markedly more subdued.

"No." She saw the strangers wince collectively.

The doctor's brow furrowed for a moment. "Do you recall anything from our earlier exchange?"

Chelsea wasn't sure what he was asking. She looked at him warily and asked, "You mean just now?" When he nodded, she replied, "Yes, I remember everything that happened after I woke up, if that's what you're asking." Part of her—the acerbic part, she figured—politely wished for a glass of water, please, if it's not too much to ask. Wisely, she didn't say as much. She paused, waiting for the doctor to stop writing and tell her she got the question wrong, but he simply nodded again and said, "Hmm."

"Is—is she going to be fine, doc?" the blond asked. The note of tremor in her voice spiked up against drone of the air-conditioning unit in the background.

"We have to run more tests to be sure," replied the doctor, pressing the stethoscope against Chelsea's chest, "but initial diagnosis is that she has retrograde amnesia."

Chelsea couldn't really say she was surprised. What was it—retrograde amnesia? She had no need for fancy medical terms to be able to pinpoint the fact that her mind had been wiped clean of memories. Yet hearing it from the doctor crystallized the matter into something so real she could almost reach out and close her fist on it, something almost tangible that made it perfectly clear that this was not just a suspicion; it was the cold, hard truth.

"Is it serious?" the woman asked again before Chelsea herself could.

"It depends." He shone a flashlight in her right eye. "Usually recovery takes place immediately after the trauma, with the oldest memories remembered first and the most recent ones last."

"Why doesn't she remember us?" It was the man this time.

The doctor shifted the flashlight to her left eye. "Temporally graded retrograde amnesia targets the patient's most recent memories. That's why she might remember things and people from her childhood, but not those she had encountered more recently. Recovery is usually swift, though, generally lasting from a week to a month. A year in severe cases, but since the damage is already healing, we can safely say that this isn't a severe case."

He straightened up and scribbled something in his clipboard. "The concussion at the back of your head is healing fine, Chelsea, but I'm afraid we still have to put you through a few more tests before releasing you. Be sure to get a lot of rest today—we'll start the tests tomorrow."

After an exchange of a few whispered words with the blond and the other man, the doctor strode away, back straight, closely followed by his assistant. Their receding footsteps echoed crisp and clear against the tiled floor.

Awkward seconds, gravid with the sound of shifting clothes and air being exhaled through the nose, slowly dragged by, each seeming to outlast the one before it without breaking the rules of the universe. Neither of the strangers seemed eager to talk, and neither of them appeared to know how to begin. To some extent, Chelsea understood the plain awkwardness of the situation, but she wasn't about to roll over on her back out of pity with her paws in the air and start easing the tension—she just had her memory wiped out, for heaven's sake, and the lurking panic in her throat was threatening to jump out at any second, take her by the shoulders and shove a knife in her skull. No, she was not going to be the one to break the silence.

It was ironic and more than a little annoying that she had a million of questions just minutes before, and now she stubbornly kept her mouth closed. At least it showed her part of her personality, even though the only thing it showed was that she was stubborn and borderline childish.

The woman looked as if she was on the verge of tears. She kept pushing strands of stray hair away from her face, tucking some behind her ear, but they fell back obstinately the moment her fingers left them. She glanced at the man, who was stolidly watching the space above Chelsea's left shoulder. Chelsea realized with some amusement that the man's hair color was a very light gray, like the color of a bright full moon. She wondered how she hadn't noticed it before.

"Um," the woman hesitantly said, finally breaking the silence. "How… how are you feeling?"

That's what the doctor asked me earlier. Care to call him back here and ask him what I said?

Chelsea bit back the undeserved harsh retort and said, "My head hurts, but I'm fine." She even tried to smile a little in an effort to put the woman at ease.

"That's good." The woman glanced at the man. She pursed her lips when he ignored her yet again. "I'm Julia—" she placed a hand on her chest, "—and this—" she gestured towards the man, "—is Vaughn."

The man—Vaughn—gave the tiniest of nods, although he still looked very angry at something. Or maybe that was just the way he coped up with stress. Chelsea narrowly caught herself from saying "nice to meet you," thinking that she had already met Julia and Vaughn before, only they remembered it and she didn't. Something about it made her head spin. To have done things she couldn't even begin to recall… rediscovering herself vaguely compared to digging for gold in a minefield: uncover one good memory at the risk of uncovering an entirely different one that will set others off in a mental version of a chain reaction.

"My name… it's Chelsea, isn't it?" she asked, feeling ever the more foolish by the second. Of course it was her name; it was what they have been calling her all this time. Besides, of all the memories she lost, only her name remained.

"Yeah," Julia said.

Silence dragged on for a few more seconds. Chelsea had hoped Julia would keep talking, if only to alleviate the inevitable stretches of awkwardness that would fill every silence. Unfortunately, Julia seemed to have run out things to say, and Vaughn was still busy being as responsive as a doorknob.

"So," Chelsea said, more in haste to keep Julia talking than in real interest to know, "are you two—well, are you married?" She realized too late how much her chosen query was assuming, but it was the first thing that lit her head up and she could only hope it masked her real intention: distraction.

Julia gave her look that blended startled and incredulous with a few drops of disgust thrown in.

"No." Vaughn's jaws were working as he spoke, the muscles clearly bulging and shifting in the light of the fluorescent lamps. His voice was low and dark, inciting images of charcoal and cigarette and the smell of wood smoke. "_We're _married." The tone of his voice offered no misinterpretations—it hid an ultimatum squirming beneath the benign words; either she accepted it or she didn't. She didn't even bother asking if he was serious: his hard stare made sure of that.

It was too much to take in. She hadn't counted on being married, especially not to _this_ stranger. He certainly didn't give the impression that he even cared about her wellbeing. What was next, children? Grandchildren?

She promised herself she wouldn't cry in front of them, so she laughed instead.


	2. Home

**Chapter Two**

* * *

_Home_

* * *

The boat bobbed onwards with a single-minded purpose. Behind it swelled a dark trail on the surface of the ocean, thinning and panning out before disappearing completely; within a few seconds, it looked as if nothing had ever disturbed the waters except for the natural waves sloshing it about. The oars in Kirk's hands dipped and rose in a steady rhythm and trickled drops of brine running down the sloping side of the boat: the path they traced grew noticeably darker.

"Do you—ah—need anything?" Vaughn hesitantly asked for the fourth time that day. His back and shoulders were stiff with abject awkwardness, his movements rigid. For the fourth time, Chelsea shook her head.

Above them, the stars winked with unattached indifference, brilliant against the deep blue-black of the midnight sky. The moon lavishly bathed earth and its meandering landscapes with borrowed light, filtered and diluted, but beautiful nonetheless.

Chelsea's opinion on her supposed husband was more than complicated, with layers upon layers of mistrust and confusion heavily laced with bold shyness, but when she took the time to peel away the coatings, what was left at the core was a tiny ball of budding hope. It didn't take another blow to the head to figure out that what they needed was to give each other a chance; although for what—to do what—she has yet to find out. That, and time.

But there were more pressing matters at hand. Coming back to what Julia had called "home" brought a sense of comfort as well as irrepressible anxiety: what else was she supposed to feel, coming back into the folds of a community that she didn't remember, but remembered her as if she'd never left? She tried to imagine what their house might look like, tried to hold the image beneath the surface of her consciousness for more than a few seconds, adding embellishments here and there as she wished. A chimney, a red mailbox, an unpainted fence. Grainy planks of old wood nailed together with questionable precision. Tufts of wild grass beneath a gnarled oak tree. Scuffed boots trailing dried mud onto the patio. It was as good an image as any, rustic and very homey—from what Vaughn and Julia had told her, she had deduced that their house was on a farm. They had suspiciously skipped a few details, but she knew they only did so because they cared, so she let the observation slide for once.

It had been a minor shock when, the day after she woke up, Julia mentioned in passing that Chelsea had been born and raised in Mineral Town, and that she and the doctor—Trent, she now knew—were childhood friends. While it explained Trent's lack of doctor-patient formality, it also sent her already addled mind reeling into her skull with a sickening thud. She had woken up in the place of her place of birth, in front of a trusted friend, and she didn't even know it. It hadn't really helped when she found out that Trent had been married to his aide, Elli, for years. Chelsea mused that she couldn't blame either Julia or Vaughn for withholding information that may further surprise her, not until she was ready, at the very least.

"Look." Chelsea involuntarily jumped at Kirk's voice. He was grinning and pointing straight ahead. Shadows loomed beyond the thick veil of mist, and as they drew nearer, she could make out the pointed roofs and pinpricks of light—lanterns hanging on wooden beams, candlelight seeping out of misty windows. The islands looked like a novelty town, the kind often described as "sleepy," yanked straight out of a holiday postcard. All that was missing was a thick blanket of snow and some misplaced mistletoes, and a loud "Ho-ho-ho" from an old man in red. At last they were near enough for her to see the gentle slope from the beach to the houses, as well as the other uninhabited islands beyond; a tingle of excitement ran up her spine: there were so many unknowns that she looked forward to uncovering. It was as if the Earth itself was rebirthed, and everything was new again, undisclosed, waiting to be discovered. She shivered in awe.

The boat's hull gently bumped against the pier. Vaughn offered her his hand and she gratefully took it—she noted the strength and roughness of his palm—steadying herself as she stepped off the boat and into the docks.

"Thanks," she said.

He nodded and said nothing. He heaved her bag of dirty clothes over his shoulder, gave Kirk a few pieces of gold, and, without warning, set off at a brisk trot in a vague northwesterly direction. Chelsea barely had the chance to wave goodbye at the oarsman before jogging in a huff to catch up to her husband. In her mind, she was strangling him—couldn't he at least have taken the time to say something like "Let's go?" Grains of sand whipped and mildly stung around her ankles as she doggedly followed Vaughn, all the while viewing the situation from other angles. She considered the possibility that Vaughn probably forgot, for a brief moment, that she currently had no idea where they lived, and that he had simply expected her to find her way home on her own. Or maybe he didn't really care. She wasn't sure which was worse.

* * *

The couch was old and lumpy, but it lent Chelsea an odd sense of buzzing comfort deep in her lower belly—she even thought the lumps gave it an enticing character that other couches, no matter how new or comfortable, sorely lacked. In fact, she found a dent in it in which she fit snugly with her legs pulled up; all she needed, she thought, cradling the mug of warm milk in her hands, was a nice spring drizzle to really set off the mood: warm and cold in equal measure.

Vaughn had barely said two words to her since she stepped foot in the house. Right now, he was staring out the window with a cup of coffee in one hand, idly bouncing a leg to an unknown rhythm. She wanted to talk to him, she really did, but he was making her feel a trifle unwanted. It was all he made her feel since waking up three days ago. Sitting opposite her, he showed no sign that he was even aware she was there. It surprisingly dropped a heavy stone in her stomach, where it lay in the midst of the warm blanket and fuzzy feelings the couch had stirred, a pessimistic figure within a horde of happy thoughts.

The silence and awkwardness pressed down on the air around her until it was distinctly oppressing. It gripped her lungs and clogged her ears, similar to being forcefully submerged underwater by an invisible hand; she felt her palms sweating despite the cold night. From somewhere outside, an owl hooted, and her nerves sang with it.

"Vaughn." Her voice sounded too loud in the middle of the night. He turned to look at her, his face expressionless, as if it was carved in granite. "Talk to me."

She heard him sigh. Had he been expecting—dreading—this? "About what?"

"Anything. You, me. Everything." Wearily, she pinched the bridge of her nose. Why was he being so difficult? They shouldn't let things stay like this, not if they wanted this marriage to work. She had gathered that he was one of those strong, silent types, but she needed this for some indefinite reason. She had to hear his voice, too, and not just hers or Julia's. Silent types be damned; sometimes it was nice to be at the receiving end of a one-way conversation. "Just… just talk."

Vaughn turned the cup in his hands and inhaled deeply. "Fine. You want me to talk, I'll talk." He leaned forward, and shadows danced on his face.

Chelsea fidgeted on the couch. The words sounded faintly accusatory to her; she could almost see them pointing their fingers straight at her, the letters maimed and shaking in suppressed anger.

"Your hair sticks up like that and there's nothing you can do about it." She was taken aback; it wasn't what she had expected him to say. Silence filled the room; it seemed to her that Vaughn had managed to surprise even himself. She opened her mouth to spew an offended retort but he cut her off immediately. "I like the way you close doors—you never slam them, like you're afraid to hurt them or something."

Despite herself, she quirked a half-smile at the last one. It was an odd way to describe someone, but strangely intimate: the only way to notice things like that was to live with the person in the same house. It spoke of genuine familiarity, a touch of fondness that had her longing to know all the minute details. What was it like, living with Vaughn? Did he slam the doors?

"You hate chess, because you think it's boring and you keep saying that the knight doesn't look like a horse at all." He was on a roll. It was as if some kind of restraining thread inside him snapped, and everything just flew out in a flurry of words, chaotic but riddled with blunt honesty. "What was it that you said—that's right, something like '_Horses don't run in the shape of an L_.' Also, you have horrible handwriting, even for a rancher."

She scoffed and rolled her eyes. She was starting to like this talkative side of Vaughn. It was so uncharacteristic of him to just spout random things, so much so that a sneaking suspicion congealed at the back of her mind—it insisted that this side of him was something he never showed anyone else. Candidly, she had no idea whether he was actually telling the truth or just messing with her; the tiny smile that pulled at a corner of his mouth made it hard to tell. She made a mental note to write something down tomorrow, see for herself if her penmanship was really that bad. She couldn't deny that bit about chess, though; it wasn't that she actually hated the sport; it was just that she had a natural aversion to the tandem of logic and strategy and that was exactly what chess demanded.

"There's a floorboard in the kitchen that squeaks when you step on it, which you do every day for no reason except to annoy me. Your favorite color is green but you keep wearing red; you're weird like that."

She laughed. Coming from someone else, she might have taken those comments as an insult. Coming from Vaughn, though, they were nothing short of refreshing—maybe it was the unlikely combination of honesty, tentative camaraderie, and newfound ease. Suddenly, the air didn't feel so oppressive at all. It was as if some sort of pressure had been released, dissipated without a trace. The relief was almost blissful, almost heavenly in its intensity. It was like the sighing respite when a lingering odor you got so used to that you'll never realize it was even there suddenly went away.

"All right, fine," she said lightly, holding a hand up. "You've made your point. I'm an oddball."

He shrugged. "Everyone has their own little quirks."

"Even you." She took a sip of milk. "Why don't you tell me something about yourself this time?"

He leaned back against the armchair. He stayed quiet for a long time, staring out the window again. She took advantage of his timely distraction to study his profile with great attention. She realized, a little flustered, just how straight his nose was. Like someone had taken the time to sculpt it carefully and hold a ruler against it, chipping away at the crooked bits. Just when she thought he wouldn't answer, he said, "Most of the time, I don't know how to treat you right." His voice was so low that she would have thought she had only imagined it if she hadn't seen his lips move. Somewhere in the middle of that sentence lay an apology, nestled between the cusp of the vowels and the rigid bars of the consonants. When she opened her mouth to offer some sort of comfort, he raised his hand and cut her off—again. "It's late, though. We should get to sleep."

She didn't argue.

* * *

She plopped herself down on the bed with a contented sigh and pressed her face against the pillow; the homey, lived-in scent of it held a welcome contrast to the sterile hospital air she'd inhaled for days. The trip home had raised her spirits in a mixture of excitement and anxiety, and she hadn't noticed just how tired she was until she lay on the bed. She wondered how she could be tired when she had spent days in a hospital bed, doing nothing but breathe, but she concluded soon enough that it wasn't something she wanted to think about. What she needed right now was some shut-eye, and everything else could wait until tomorrow. She inhaled again, reveling in the traces of something floral—her own shampoo, maybe?—lingering on the pillowcase.

Just then, something grazed along the edges of her mind, feather-light and fleeting. She grasped at it and tugged it up and out, away from the mire it burrowed itself into, until it hardened into something recognizable. Her heart skipped. It was a memory.

Granted, it wasn't anything monumental or even remotely significant, but she felt a certain triumph in its discovery. She gave herself a mental pat on the back, even though she didn't really do anything special. Dr. Trent had, after all, said that recovery would be swift, and this was the beginning. Everything will come back soon, in their own time. The memory played itself like an old-fashioned movie seen through her eyes: she and Vaughn sitting on the bed, playing a game of chess. She frowned against the pillow. Something wasn't right, but she couldn't place it just yet.

"Take your shoes off."

She gingerly sat up, slightly embarrassed that she had to be reprimanded for something only a child would have done. Vaughn had just come out of the bathroom, holding a toothbrush. She had to suppress an impish grin: the sight was so foreign and domestic at the same time, it almost looked adorable. The grin threatened to melt into a burst of derisive laughter. Vaughn and adorable were on the opposite sides of the spectrum, and he'd be the first to say it.

He crossed over to the dresser and placed the toothbrush in its dispenser. Chelsea decided to tell him about what she had remembered; she only hoped it was a real nugget of memory and not some half-baked daydream her brain had concocted to convince herself she was healing.

"Hey," she said. "Do you remember that time when we were playing chess on the bed?" She said it as casually as she could, like someone commenting about the weather.

His face brightened visibly, albeit a little guarded. "You remember that?"

She smiled. "Just now, actually. But why did we play chess?" She suddenly remembered what had seemed wrong about the memory. "I hate chess. You said so yourself."

"You had trouble sleeping that night." He sat himself on the other side of the bed and started pulling off his shoes as he talked. "You said chess is boring and it would help you sleep."

She laughed loudly. She found herself surprised that Vaughn had even agreed to something so inanely childish. It was surprisingly sweet of him, she thought. "So… did it work?"

She caught his smirk as he bent down to tug at his socks. "Yeah, it did, actually." She watched him roll them into a ball and throw it in the hamper. "We weren't even halfway through when you quit."

Something about the way he said it rubbed her the wrong way. That tone of his voice… there was no mistake, he was gloating. He'd won the match, and he was now rubbing it in her face. As if in confirmation, he turned to her and raised an eyebrow. She felt her eyes narrow into slits, but the effect was hopelessly lost on him. "I bet I would've won if my head was in the game." She crossed her arms. "I bet I would win if we play right now."

He laughed, and despite herself, she smiled at the sound. He laid himself down on his side of the bed and faced away from her. "Go to sleep, Chelsea."

"Fine." She wanted a rematch. She had only been teasing him when she challenged him earlier, but now it was personal. She was going to defeat him in a game of chess, and come hell or high water, she was going to rub it in his face—and his straight, pretty nose. That ought to wipe that smirk from his face, that sneaky little cheater.

Well. She had no idea she was this competitive.

"Take your shoes off."

She grumbled inaudibly, but obeyed nonetheless. Being ordered to do things like a child did not improve her resolve for a rematch. "I still think I can beat you."

He laughed again, and as she tucked herself underneath the covers and faced away from him, she realized she really liked the sound of his laugh. She had to make him laugh more often.


	3. Words

**Chapter Three**

* * *

_Words_

* * *

She shifted in her seat again. Vaughn watched her over the top of his morning paper, his eyes attuned to flick back down on the page at the slightest hint that she might glance at him. She was nervous, obviously. The way she fidgeted with her fingers gave it away in a single glimpse, like a small movement through a half-open door; he could almost perceive the smoky waves of dread rolling off her stooped shoulders down to the floorboards, twisting and warping into something harsh enough to cut flesh and draw blood.

He said nothing, though. He was not a proficient speaker: ideas would gradually come together in his mind in beautiful coherence, only to get maimed beyond recognition somewhere along the soundless journey to his mouth. He preferred watching instead.

He let his eyes drop towards the paper and glide from left to right to make it seem as if he was, in fact, reading. In truth, his mind had too much on it to take in what he saw; he barely registered the inked words against the dirty gray of the tabloid.

Life was too short to be worrying about matters that didn't concern him. He was taxed to capacity. He felt it as an ominous creak somewhere inside him: a broken, quiet whisper, telling him that his brain was a dam stretched to its limit. One more thought was all it would take to break that dam right at the seams, and it would all come rushing out, a torrent of worries and anxieties and second-guessing, surging out of the neat package with all the organized labels violently torn off.

All the veins of thoughts streaming through his mind left, right, and center spun his head around and made him dizzy. He tried to reach out and catch one of them, but they slipped through his fist with absurd ease; he couldn't even make sense of the individual thoughts.

The ink had rubbed off on his fingers. It made his fingerprints stand out from the recessed skin, dark and grubby, vaguely resembling grease. The paper was right in front of his eyes, yet it seemed to him as if he were viewing it from far away, through someone else's eyes, using someone else's hands, from the other side of a frosted glass sheet. He rustled it and took refuge in the sound it made: it sounded too crisp and too real to belong in a dream. He was awake; he had to focus on staying awake.

"What if they don't like me?" Chelsea asked. She was now gripping the sides of her chair. He could see her hands trembling, her thumbs etching patterns on the soft wood. She hadn't touched her breakfast.

Vaughn briefly closed his eyes.

Talking. It was one of the very few things in the face of which his infallible confidence faltered. He would rather pretend reading the paper while steaming in the heat of his thoughts and sneaking glances at his wife, but she needed any form of solace she could grasp right now, and it was his duty to provide it. If only he could properly channel the thought into words without somehow ending up with nothing but a grain of what he had intended to say, like a solid block of wood whittled away to nothingness.

"Nonsense," he said simply, hating the curtness of it, the very same thing that prevented misconstructions. Being curt proved to be a double-edged sword; it could go either way.

She leaned forward rested her elbows on the table. She held his eyes for a moment, his questioning and hers despairing, and then dropped her head into her hands, her hair pooling into crescents around her plate. From where he sat, she looked like a miniature waterfall of dark strawberry blond, surrounded on all sides by round red cliffs. He heard her take a shuddering breath.

"Does your head hurt?" He carefully folded the paper and placed it beside his drinking glass.

She shook her head, and the waterfall trembled. It caught the light streaming from the window and trapped it within the strands, lifting and brightening the color in an organic desaturation. It looked luminous and surreal. "Just nervous." Her voice sounded muffled. He wished he had the right words balled up conveniently in the palm of his hand, ready to transfer them to her own. But he didn't. Vaughn never had the right words, in his hand or otherwise.

Gently, hesitantly, he reached out and touched her on the shoulder. She gave no sign that she felt it. "Hey," he said, surprised at the sincerity in his own voice. "You'll be fine." He wanted to say more, wanted to do more, but a string of liquid fear held him back; he was afraid he would say something he didn't know he shouldn't.

She was quiet for a while. Finally, she looked up. Her hair fell across her shoulders and fingers, shadowing the contours with faithful accuracy, like a serpentine river of whiskey glinting in the sunlight. She was smiling—her face looked drawn and worn, pinched around the eyes, but she was smiling and that was all that mattered. "Thank you," she said.

He dipped his chin and stared out the window. Shards of light streamed through the glass and set dust motes aglow; he found himself involuntarily breathing in small bursts, as if afraid of inhaling them. There was a certain effulgent beauty in the dust suspended in midair, yet it provoked a guarded reaction from him—dust was still dust, no matter how beautiful. A neat parade of black ants marched with inhuman uniformity towards a crack in the windowsill.

No, Vaughn never had the words, but Chelsea always understood.

"Talk to me," she said, sounding perceptibly more cheerful, yet still vaguely apprehensive. She had started nibbling on her toast without him noticing. He watched the swell of her lower lip as she chewed, soft pink in the morning light; down the curve of her chin; until his eyes were tracing the clean lines of her jaw. He stopped himself just as he reached the base of her ear.

"About what?" His voice sounded unusually husky to him.

She looked down at the table. A crease appeared between her eyebrows as she thought. "How did I lose my memory?" She caught his gaze, and then added, as an afterthought, "Julia didn't want to tell me. Said I had to hear it from you."

He felt cold trepidation pooling at the bottom of his stomach, dripping down the sides, filling it up and weighing it down while twisting his guts within the prongs of a figurative fork. His jaw clenched in reflex. She was still waiting for him to answer. Slowly, he eased the tension in his jaw enough to let him speak. He cleared his throat. "You… hit your head on a rock."

Chelsea tilted her head. Her eyes reflected the light and took on an inquisitive appearance: bright and sharp, almost piercing. He wondered if she knew the effect it had on him, or whether she was being intimidating on purpose. "How?"

"You were riding your horse at a gallop." He only just registered the ants now marching across the table. How did they get there? "Threw you off. Landed on your head. Blacked out for days."

She lightly ran a finger around the rim of her glass. He faintly recalled how she used to do the same to the bridge of his nose—and exactly why his _nose_, of all things, she never told him. "That sounds like a reckless thing to do."

It was, he thought. He scraped a fingernail across a deep groove in the tabletop. "You were upset." When she raised an eyebrow, he added, "Very upset." And it had been his fault. Him and his tongue and his insensitivity. The sensation in his stomach froze into splinters of spiky little icicles that dug into his insides, ladling over his chest a heaping pile of guilt.

She pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes. The expression was achingly familiar, so undoubtedly hers that for one second, he thought she was back—that _his_ Chelsea was back. But she wasn't, of course, not yet. She was still a stranger who had his wife's face, and a stranger she would remain until she regained the memories she had lost.

"Upset about what?" she asked.

A sharp knock on the door saved him from having to answer. Vaughn heaved a sigh of relief as her attention shifted away from him and the ice shards in his stomach began to thaw. The prickling sensation they stirred still lingered, though, and he was certain it was only a matter of time before the issue was brought up again, with mordant stalactites poking through his guts instead of measly shards.

"It's them," she said breathlessly, eyes wide with panic. "They're here."

"I'll get it." He stood up and walked to the door with purposeful strides, aware of Chelsea's presence trailing in his wake. He stopped at the door and felt the warm touch of her breath coiling near his left shoulder. He swallowed thickly. His hand on the doorknob, he turned to her and asked, "Ready?"

She seemed to be steadying herself. She took a deep breath, clenched her jaw, and nodded. Her eyes were steeled with grim determination, reinforced by an unnatural calmness that veiled every other emotion her face might betray. "Ready."

The door swung open. Chelsea gasped.

Half of the population of the islands stood at their door.

* * *

"Look at you!" Taro all but yelled at Chelsea, flailing his thin, mottled arms like a windmill. He lifted her arms in his fingers, examining them through narrowed eyes clouded over with age, and experimentally poked her ribs. "You're too thin. You could work as a barbecue stick endorser. Here, drink this every day." He shoved bags of Elli leaves onto Chelsea's arms with more force than what could have been expected from an old man. "That'll fatten you up," he added airily.

"Um… thanks." Chelsea looked to Vaughn in comical misery, silently mouthing "help."

Vaughn felt the beginnings of a migraine twitch deep in his skull, like the faint throbbing of an unhealed wound under the blade of a scalpel. He had expected the villagers to visit today, but not en masse like this. It was dangerously close to a stampede. There were so many of them that instead of inviting them inside the house, the bewildered couple had decided to step out to greet them.

"That's Taro," he whispered in her ear. "Used to be a farmer. First house on the right."

"Got it," she whispered back.

"And you!" Taro whirled on his heel to point an unsteady finger at Vaughn. "You need a haircut. You look prettier than your wife."

Chelsea released a very ill-suppressed, very unladylike snort of utter amusement at his expense. He glared at her, but her grin only widened.

There was a bustle of gifts, cordial greetings, awkward introductions, and even a few hugs throughout. All the while, he stood at her elbow, supplying helpful comments when she appeared lost: where Chen lived, what Gannon did for a living, where to find Pierre on weekends. Vaughn hated every second of it.

He had nothing against the people themselves, but together they formed one of the things he detested the most: crowds. They tended to rub his patience raw, stipple his ears with angry welts, and set his blood on fire until it oozed out of the pores of his sanity. Even now, the drone of multiple chatter at once made him feel as if his brain was being pulled apart and poked with knitting needles. He needed a stiff drink.

He retreated to a relatively safe distance when it seemed that everyone had been properly introduced, sorted, and filed away in Chelsea's mental cabinets.

Someone elbowed him in the ribs. He sputtered a particularly colorful expletive and looked around for his assailant, his face set in a dark grimace, only to find Julia watching him with crossed arms. She was tapping her foot impatiently.

"What do you want?" he demanded.

"Hello to you, too," she replied dryly. "How's she doing?"

He ran a hand over his face in intense annoyance. He wanted to rip something apart with his bare hands; all the little snags had piled up, one on top of another, and he almost reached the point of exploding in a searing barrage of pent-up anger. Julia was not helping. It took monumental effort to keep himself from falling apart and breaking something's neck. "She's right there. Why don't you ask her yourself?"

They both turned to where Chelsea's head of strawberry blond dipped up and down in the midst of the adoring crowd. She looked decidedly uncomfortable under all the various gifts thrust upon her—never the gentleman, it didn't occur to him to help her with the burden—yet she seemed to be enjoying herself all the same. "You know what I mean," said Julia, still looking over at Chelsea. "How's she holding up?"

"She's fine." He gingerly pressed down at the spot where Julia had elbowed him; it screamed in a painful protest. Nothing serious, but it would probably leave a nasty bruise. The woman had surprising strength for someone so small. "She's recovering."

"Have you told her yet? You know, about everything?"

His anger fizzled away and disappeared with a wet pop. He averted his gaze when Julia focused her full attention on him. "I'm going to."

"Of course you are," she said, her tone hinting at slight mockery. She shifted her weight on another foot, her hip sticking out: to him, it looked like a shapely mound of dry dirt turned sideways. A slight wind caught her collar and whipped it about her neck; it danced in unison with fallen strands of her hair. She paused. "Tell me you won't wait until she remembers everything."

"I won't wait until she remembers everything."

She puckered her lips in annoyance. "Do you mean that?"

"No."

She sighed in defeat. Her eyes swept along the dispersing crowd with piercing meticulousness and finally stopped at the point where Elliot stood awkwardly, away from the crowd, looking every bit like the misplaced child at a family gathering. He seemed to be trying to figure out exactly what to do with his limbs. "I'm just looking out for you, you know," Julia said breathily.

A smirk tugged at a corner of Vaughn's mouth. "Are you talking to me, or to him?" he asked, inclining his head in Elliot's direction.

She glared at him. "Vaughn."

"Yeah, I know." He saw Denny wave at him in greeting, walking towards the exit. He nodded back. "I know."

* * *

"I don't know."

"Huh." Chelsea placed the kettle on the stove and turned to face him as she waited for it to boil. "I thought you would."

Drops of water condensed on the cold surface of the bottle in his hand, some of them running down and saturating the label, others holding on to their places as transparent oval beads. He wiped away some of the moisture with his thumb. Not a stiff drink, but he could work with it. He would have liked some bourbon, though. "What makes you think I'd know?"

She grinned. "I don't know. You're friends with Denny. I thought you might know if—"

"No, I don't," he said firmly. He gulped down his drink and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "You just got introduced to them and you're already gossiping with the nosy ones."

"You act like you don't do it." She raised a prurient eyebrow at him.

"That's because I don't."

"Keep telling yourself that. Anyway, I'm not gossiping. I'm helping Lanna." The kettle whistled behind her. She switched the stove off and reached for a mug. "She's really into Denny, you see, and she'd like to know whether she has a chance, that's all." The distinctively bitter scent of Elli leaves sprang to life and spiraled around the room as she poured the contents of the kettle into the mug. Smoke rose from it, a soft white column billowing and curling at the top. She walked over to the couch she loved so much and sat herself opposite him.

"Shouldn't you be asking Denny himself?" Vaughn asked when she looked comfortable enough. He just couldn't grasp the basics of female logic, with all its twists and turns and hidden loopholes barging in on him around the corners, when he least expected it. He'd given up on trying a long time ago.

She blew on her tea to cool it. Her eyes, trained on him above the rim of her mug, were full of mirth. "That would kind of defeat the purpose of being discreet, now, wouldn't it?"

"You do realize, don't you," he said slowly, as if drawing it out would make it truer, "that Lanna's best chance is to let Denny know about it?"

Chelsea sipped at her drink and grimaced. "Gah, that's bitter." She took another sip. She kept the liquid in her mouth for a moment before swallowing. "You have a point, but the goal is to be discreet."

He looked at her askance. "What for?"

He must have failed to hide the incredulity in his voice, because Chelsea started laughing. He must also have failed to hide the utter befuddlement he felt, because she laughed even harder. He was afraid she'd drop the tea in her gaiety—it was scorching hot, and a horrid scalding would follow a slip of her fingers.

"It's a woman thing," she said when her laughter subsided. "We like to prolong things, you know? Like falling in love little by little, that sort of thing. We think it's sweeter that way."

"And before he knows it, the guy gets roped into marrying a crazy woman," he grumbled.

She laughed again.

"You wouldn't understand," she said shakily, fighting off the last vestiges of a giggle. "You're not a woman. You're prettier than me, but you're not a woman."

She just had to bring that up, didn't she?

He simply shook his head in resignation. Vaughn had no words. At least, he thought, she was happy, never mind that it was at his expense. He'd choose her happiness over anything, even if it meant never having the right words to say for the rest of his life.

* * *

_**a/n:**_

_Yeah, I just couldn't resist writing from Vaughn's point of view. I'm planning to alternate POVs every two chapters, just to give the illusion of having method to the madness. Sorry if I took so long to update, but I promise to try to do so at least once a week._

_To all those who reviewed (**HersheyChoco101**, **dksajdlf**, **harvestmoonluver4164**, **chelsietta **), favorited, subscribed to alerts, and those who even added me to their favorite authors list, I extend my deepest gratitude. Your support is what authors pick up at night when everything is quiet, __one by one,_ with all the love and gentleness of a mother holding her child. The little things you do are what we hold close to our hearts, basking in the knowledge that out there, someone's reading and appreciating what we've written, and that knowledge helps us whenever we run into the thorny wall commonly referred to as writer's block.

_So, again, from the bottom of my heart, thank you._


	4. Breathe

**Chapter Four**

* * *

_Breathe_

* * *

"I think I can manage."

The concussion had completely healed and she started wearing her bandanna again. It presented such a nostalgic semblance of normalcy that the past weeks melted into each other in a whirr of ambiguity, tumbling straight into that invisible place to where dreams and nightmares fled during times of wakefulness. If he paid less attention, he could have fooled himself into throwing his tenacious uncertainties into the air. He could have let himself believe that among the sour lemons life had hurled at his feet, one was at least unfurling into something resembling the proverbial lemonade.

But no, Vaughn proved to excel at paying attention, and somewhere between the beating of his heart and the ringing in his ears was a niggling half-whisper at the base of his skull: don't kid yourself; it's still not her, it said mockingly. He twisted the broken voices up and over their own backs, kept the mutterings in a firm headlock, and wrestled the vile murmurs into submission.

"I know you can," he said, hesitating by the bedroom door. "It's just that—"

"You're worried, I know," Chelsea finished for him. He scowled. She gave her bandanna one last assessing tug before turning away from the mirror to look at him. "I appreciate the concern, I really do, but I can handle it." She crossed her arms and leaned a hip against the dresser, almost knocking over a bottle of hand lotion.

His fingertips tingled with erratic unease. He willed his feet to move, to take him out the door and into the spilling daylight beyond it, but his boots remained stuck to the floor, obstinate and impassive. He watched her eyes zoning in on him with the gleam of a predator's on a bolting prey, urging him to go on and leave her in peace. Still, he dallied.

"Vaughn—"

"All right, I'm going." His boots thudded across the floorboards. The ringing in his ears persistently grew so loud that it almost became the physical manifestation of a cerebral noise. He suspected that if he waved his hands beside his head, he would detect the texture of the sound tangling with his fingers, rougher than air yet smoother than water, caught in the muggy tangent that divided the states of pseudo-matter. He wondered if Chelsea could hear it.

He barely took three steps when he turned around and fixed her with a firm stare. "I can't do this."

To her credit, she smiled. Anyone else would have been cowering before the intensity of his gaze, but Chelsea wasn't just anyone. He'd learned that the hard way. She met his eyes head-on with a clear air of daring nonchalance. "I'm a grown woman, Vaughn," she said. "I can take care of myself."

"I'm not arguing this with you."

Her face darkened. She pushed herself away from the dresser, chin in the air, courage and defiance in her stance. The bottle of hand lotion toppled to its side. "Neither am I."

They stood facing each other for the span of an infinite heartbeat, neither of them daring to say anything. It seemed to him as if he were sighting her down the barrel of a gun, his finger poised on the trigger, ready to squeeze if need be. It boiled down to who would concede first, ifone of them had more sense than pride to lower the gun, bow their head, and acquiesce to the other.

Seconds passed. He heard her breathing from where he stood.

In the end, he surrendered to her unyielding determination, carved open by the glinting blade of her eyes; he folded in on himself in a huff of insecurity and tucked his defeat away in a quiet corner of his mind where he sat nursing a bruised ego. It unnerved him how she had managed to stare him down as if he were nothing but a misbehaving dog, while he had to struggle with the surge of plaintive emotions she roused in him.

He looked away. "Chelsea, please…"

"Look," she said softly, her voice warm again, "I understand how you feel."

She leaned on the dresser once more before continuing. "I'm not letting this go, though. You have a job and a responsibility. I can take care of myself."

"No," he said. Part of his mind thrashed its sinewy arms and yelled at him to stop, to quit talking and arguing before he managed to turn this petty debacle into a full-blown spat. But even his screaming nerves couldn't stop his tongue from flapping: she had hurt herself once because of him and he would not let it happen again.

"No?"

"I'm not going."

One side of her mouth curled up in a voiceless snarl. "Be reasonable," she growled. Relenting with a sigh, she uncrossed her arms and rubbed her neck. "You can't stay away from your job forever."

"I don't plan to," he said, avoiding her eyes. From outside, their dog barked. He couldn't quite recall the exact point in the past when he stopped referring to the thing as _her_ dog and started calling it theirs. "Look, I'll go tomorrow. Just let me stay today."

"What is it with you and overprotectiveness?" She shifted her weight and the dresser creaked in wooden objection. The bottle of hand lotion rolled on its side and stopped right at the edge, the top peeking over the precipice. "Really. I'm amnesiac, not pregnant."

Blood drained from his face; his heart jumped to his throat. _Pregnant_. He was hit by an illogically daunting sensation that his entirety went ahead and laid itself down before her to be pried and examined: face up, splayed, and elegantly fanned out like cards on a poker table. He decided to ignore her last sentence.

"I'm not being overprotective," he said, a little defensively. "I'm just worried about you."

"To the point of being overprotective," she sniffed, scuffing a shoe against the floor. Her shoulders hunched, defeated, all traces of her good humor vanishing like stars at the crux between dusk and dawn.

Vaughn's throat still felt tight. She had said "pregnant." Funny how the mere mention of the word, innocent though it may be, could bleed him away of any coherent thought and incapacitate his lungs in one fell swoop. He had the impression that if he looked in the mirror and opened his mouth, he would see his heart in there, pressed snuggly against the uvula, drumming away the seconds as if nothing were amiss. He swallowed the stray image with a decisive gulp and wiped his sweaty palms on his pants.

If he could only tell her about the mixed feelings roiling deep in his heart, without being too blunt or too verbose; if only he had an oral scissor to neatly cut around the words, trim the hollow adjectives, snip away at the edges where interjections and empty fillers were thickest, and, finally, shear through the garbage of ifs and buts until only the full meaning remained at the center, pure and intact.

"I almost lost you."

Chelsea's eyes shot up from the floor to his face. She opened her mouth, hesitated, and closed it tightly. She refused to meet his eyes and waited for him to go on.

"I thought you were going to die." He fought to keep his voice from wavering, and bore a touch of pride in his belly at his success. "Can you blame me for being protective?" There was something comical in the way he'd subtly dropped "over" from the word, but neither of them picked up on it.

The words hung in the air between them, wafting in the warm puffs of their breaths, churning with the unspoken and left hanging. He caught sight her face softening, and without giving her a chance to say anything, he turned on his heel and finally marched out the door.

* * *

The house was dark when he came home.

He had had plenty of idle time to regret the events of the morning; apathy had yanked what little scrap of his attention remained away from the business transactions and plopped it right in the middle of the quasi-argument they'd had. It was the memory of her face losing its hard edge that chilled him: the downed corners of her mouth easing, her eyes widening, the crease in her brow unknotting. He replayed in his mind, in such impeccable detail that it put films to shame, the part where the soot-stained hand of realization touched the steel in her eyes and tempered it to acceptance.

The prospect of seeing her face hardened once more frightened him more than he would ever care to admit. He knew, the instant he turned his back on her just when she began to understand, that he would regret the impulsive decision more than anything.

Vaughn never intended to leave. He just did.

The dog greeted him at the door with an exuberance common only to dogs and children. He often considered whether the excitement stemmed from the deepest kind of love or the most misinterpreted class of ignorance. Maybe both. Chelsea had named this dog Charlie, and when he had asked her about the choice of name, she vehemently denied any sort of connection to Chen's son. "I named him before I met the boy," she'd insisted.

He gave the mutt a quick pat on the head and a scratch behind the ears before letting himself in. The house's interior emitted an air of lissome mystique, cloaked in the shadows, illuminated by the moon; it ate everything indoors, stripped them of color, and digested individual objects into a scene nearing a glaring monochromatic-neutral state: black and white and nothing else.

The moonlight flowing from outside lengthened the shadows inside, including his: it stretched outward until it resembled a life-sized stickman, with lanky limbs and a deformed head. It had a transparent element within its essence, as if it were thinned ink dribbled upon the ground and kicked around until it dried.

The couch—_her _couch—was empty. He supposed she had gone ahead and slept without waiting for him, which triggered a flutter of relief and a twinge of disappointment. Relief, because he could not begin to imagine what to say to her after what he had done, and disappointment, because something childlike tugged soundlessly at his frayed conscience and insisted that he apologize as soon as possible.

He considered stopping at the fridge for a bottle of cold beer, just to have something to dab away at his stewing thoughts and leave his mind dank and mossy. The tortuous darkness, winding around table legs and his own ankles, convinced him otherwise.

He stumbled his way in the dark, arms outstretched, trying to find his way to the bedroom. Why he didn't turn the lights on first was debatable, but it offered no surprise that it ranked low among his list of priorities. He bumped into furniture, accidentally kicked chairs, scuffed his toes against loose floorboards, and at one point chanced to close his hand upon a yet unidentified insect scurrying along the wall.

Vaughn didn't stop the sullen grin that stretched his mouth over his teeth when he managed to reach the bedroom door. It wasn't locked.

The icy splinters in his stomach reemerged from their torpor.

He pushed the door open gently and cringed at the creaking jambs. He took such care in being quiet that he almost jumped when he realized she was sitting on the bed, facing him. Amber light spilled from an oil lamp on the side table, casting prancing shadows on everything it touched: the wooden planks of the walls, the ceiling and its cobwebs, the musty curtains, even her face. He noted the lack of hostile expression from her.

"Ah," he said pathetically, recovering from the mild shock. "You're… awake."

"I wanted to wait for you."

He hesitated at the door. Once again, they found themselves in the places they had stood at hours ago. He cleared his throat. "You didn't have to."

"I wanted to, okay?" She smiled. Something in his stomach somersaulted. She paused. "I wanted to apologize."

He found himself laughing softly. It was absurd, all of it. He had spent the whole day mulling over how to ask her forgiveness without considering the possibility that she might be doing the same. That she _was_ doing the same caused a quiver of pleasant warmth to scuttle along his limbs until it reached his fingertips. "I'm the one who should be doing that."

She made an irritated noise deep in her throat and waved him off. "Just hear me out." She paused to inhale deeply through her nose. "I'm sorry. I really am. I didn't even stop to think about how you were coping up with…" Her sentence trailed of, her hands waving around in a vague gesture. "…everything."

"Hey," he started, but Chelsea waved him off again, a little impatiently this time.

"I was selfish," she said over his protests. "I thought that since I was the one who lost my memories, I'm the one suffering the most. But that's you. I've thought about it today. It's a little like losing your wife, isn't it?"

He couldn't bring himself to nod, or to think, so he just stared. Somehow, she took his response as her cue to continue.

"I don't think I'd be able to deal with it if it were me. You know, remembering everything while the other one doesn't? And watching them almost die? And then listening to them push you away like they don't need you?" She stifled a disbelieving, humorless laughter. "It's ridiculous. And incredibly difficult. I don't know how you deal with it."

"Listen—"

"I'm sorry." Her voice shook. Oh, no, his inner voice said. Don't cry. Please don't cry. He heard her take another deep breath, watched her chest rise and fall. "I really am," she added, and it made him proud that her voice was even.

"I…" It was his turn now, and the fleeing words hung themselves at his throat, climbing and crawling over each other in a frenzy of disordered coherence. Her apology rang of remorseful sincerity; how was he supposed to match something like that? He went through the lines he'd practiced, traced each letter with caliginous eyes, inspected the undersides for dents and scratches. They echoed of falseness and monotony, their bellies gaping with humbling levity. He swallowed. "Sorry for walking out on you."

There, he said it. He successfully exhausted his meager supply of direct apologies for the day, and, even if he tried, he could not follow it up with an appropriate explanation, or anything that would verify the fact the he indeed regretted his actions.

It seemed enough for her, though, and she smiled. "Apology accepted. Let's not do that again."

She patted the sheets beside her, silently asking him to sit. The corners of his mouth sank in unhidden confusion. She pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes when he didn't move, and he felt an invisible force, like horizontal gravity, hook around his waist and pull him towards her. He sat down on the spot she had indicated.

"I remembered something today," she said when he stopped smoothing and pawing at the sheets.

He stilled. His heartbeats rose to a steep crescendo darkly colored by equal parts euphoria and terror. "Yeah?" he managed to say.

"It has something to do with someone's birthday, a bunch of wild moondrops, and a bumbling idiot who wears a cowboy hat." She laid her head on his shoulder. The gesture resonated with so much familiarity that he found himself reflexively putting an arm around her. God, he missed this.

He smiled and kissed the top of her head. She stiffened in surprise, but relaxed straightaway. "Tell me about it," he said.

"Actually, I was thinking that maybe _you_ could tell me about it." She shifted a little so she could see his face. "Why on earth were you wearing a cowboy hat?"

He was smirking, he knew. "I still do."

"You're not wearing one right now."

"Not right now."

"Right." She grinned. The whites of her eyes and her teeth gleamed in the lamplight: it made her look otherworldly. "And why were the flowers wilting? If I remember right, they look like they've been stolen from someone's tombstone."

He frowned, indignant. He'd bought those ridiculously overpriced things from the florist in Bluebell, and she thought they were stolen? "Why would I steal something I can pick off the ground for free?"

"And exactly how many hours passed before you gave them to me?"

He did a quick calculation. "Five, maybe six."

She snorted and pulled away to bestow upon him a stare that was half-incredulous, half-entertained. "So you picked moondrops from somewhere six hours before you gave them to me."

"I didn't pick them, I bought them."

"What?"

He sighed. This was turning out to be more than just a simple reminiscence on an uneventful birthday. "I bought them from a florist in Bluebell."

Her grin gradually widened until she was laughing at him. "Why would you buy flowers from Bluebell? I mean, you knew they were going to wilt before you're even halfway to Sunshine Islands. You could find clumps of moondrops out in the street! Why buy them from Bluebell?"

"There was a florist," he said defensively, feeling very foolish. Her laughter grew louder. "I just happened to deliver a cow to the client, and since there was a florist there, you know…"

She was still giggling. Embarrassment replaced the warmth that had crept all over him and stoked fire in his cheeks. While he had to admit that he hadn't been thinking clearly when he'd bought the flowers, he could certainly do without his wife laughing at him about it.

"All right, all right," she said, wiping tears from the corners of her eyes. "Thank you. It was a stupid thing to do, but thank you."

She kissed him on the cheek, and before his mind even had the option to process what had just transpired, she tucked herself under the sheets and faced away from him.

"Good night, Vaughn," she said.

Seconds passed in stunned silence before he found his voice. "Good night."

* * *

_**a/n:**_

_I googled top dog names and Charlie came up a lot, so I tentatively decided to name Chelsea's dog Charlie. It stuck, so now there's Charlie the Boy and Charlie the Dog._

_I took the liberty in redesigning the house, just to make it seem more like a house and less like a cottage. Nothing serious, I hope. Also, I changed the summary. Hope it sucks less now._

_Feedback are very much welcome. Thank you so much for reading!_


	5. Motions

**Chapter Five**

* * *

_Motions_

* * *

Chelsea awoke without a jolt. The transition from sleep to wakefulness was that of uniform smoothness, with no distinct borders that marked where one ended and the other began. One moment, she was tripping about in a hazy dream, hurtling along pulsating corridors of distorted impressions. The next, time slowly slid to a gradual filtering, a slow trickling, of elements plucked out from outside stimuli and her own messy pile of memories: faces from real life, idyll places fashioned in the substance nightmares were made of, sounds the vigilant half of herself could pick up. Then, she was awake, long before she even realized it.

Outside, the warbling of blue jays mingled with dry screeching of cicadas, a symphony of clarion notes and lilting cadence; together they formed the forest's own little orchestra, following every swing and swish of nature's summer baton with beady eyes.

She sat up. Sleep still fogged her perception of everything, and for a moment—which took on the solitary veneer of an hour that never passed—she sat motionless, staring at the wall, fiddling with her fingers the even stitching on the fringes of her blanket. She didn't yet possess the correct amount of fatigue, or whatever it was required of a person, to yawn.

As far as she knew, she had always spent mornings like this: disoriented, blindly groping at reality for traces of herself; patting her cranial pockets for leftover lint from the previous day, stretching the shroud far back enough to encompass the past weeks; checking and cross-checking the information against each other to verify their validity, storing the genuine while discarding the hallucinatory. All this for the simple confirmation that her memories, the new ones she'd made, were still there.

When she was done, everything snapped into place and made perfect sense.

Every day, this ritual. A wearisome journey, a slow trek towards that singular point of clarity in the midst of muddled memories, like the point of focus in a renaissance painting, making her way towards it with deliberate steps that echoed her own questions.

She laid the facts down in a row: she was in bed, it was morning, her memories had begun the process of resurfacing, and Vaughn was nowhere in sight. His side of the bed was already made up, the sheets smooth and without crease; it bore none of his warmth. He must have been up for quite a while.

She stretched, finally mustered the proper prerequisites to yawn, and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. She went through the motions of tidying the bed almost robotically: smoothing the covers, tucking the ends under the mattress, fluffing the pillows, folding the blanket. The movements themselves did not require much active thinking, and she found herself letting her instincts take the helm and play pilot; detached, she watched her hands and fingers move with practiced efficiency.

It was the same mechanical tendency that guided her to the bathroom where she washed her face, brushed her teeth, and changed out of her nightclothes. She knew she was witnessing firsthand the phenomenon Trent had described in his clinic, hours before she was officially released: that memories and hard-wired information were stored in different areas of the brain. To Chelsea, it simply meant that she was not disabled. Amnesiac or no, she still had a working knowledge of the world in general, lodged deep in the gray whorls of her temporal neocortex, safe from the damage the concussion had wrought.

Downstairs, in the kitchen, Vaughn was already seated at the table, his morning paper open and gripped at the edges, the top half almost folded outwards. Only his hair and forehead were visible: even from the where she stood, the crease between his eyebrows stood out, pronounced. He seemed thoroughly engrossed in what he was reading; he hadn't noticed her walk in.

Chelsea pulled out a chair. Its legs scraped along the floorboards, wood against wood, and Vaughn looked up.

"Hey," he said.

"'Morning." Her voice sounded low, stuck halfway in the ubiquitous manner of shedding the last vestiges of sleep clinging to it. She stifled a yawn and reached for the maple syrup. That she managed not to take a swig straight from the bottle was a simple matter of self-control on her part. She was in the process of dribbling it all over the waffles when she caught the newspaper's dry crackling, crisp and trenchant in the limpid silence. Vaughn was pushing himself up off the table.

"You're leaving already?" Chelsea asked. "Isn't it too early?"

He shrugged. "Just waited for you to get up. Have to catch up on the deliveries." He made his way across the kitchen and ruffled her hair in a parting gesture as he passed her by.

"Take care," she called after him. She caught a faint "Yeah" from the direction of the living room, the sound diluted by air and distance. The front door creaked open—she counted the seconds: one, two, three—and closed with a firm thud. She smiled: so Vaughn didn't slam doors, either.

She turned back to her waffles and shoved half in her mouth. Table manners occupied top priority when eating in another's company, but eating alone, they tended to blend in the background with the rest of the unremarkable décor, shunted out of the way by more substantial things—like food. The waffles bent and flattened under her teeth; they struck the perfect balance between soft and chewy, imbued with the unmistakable dulcet undertones of the maple syrup. She remembered breakfasting on toast the other day; did Vaughn prepare these waffles, too?

They were gone sooner than she would have liked. She collected the dishes and utensils and stood at the sink to wash them; again, the mechanical rheostat of ingrained habit took over, and her mind wandered languidly among things not completely of this world. She perused the catalog of possibilities for the day's activities; the other day, she had done nothing but attend to her farm, if only to take her mind off things.

A strange desire to do something else took hold of her by the arms and steered her to a wayward thought. She recalled the shiver she had felt when she saw the islands for the first time since waking up, how the earth seemed to have rebirthed itself and everything was new again, how the passing cloud in her mind concealed what she had already known.

Today, she was going out. She was going to see the islands.

* * *

The hut projected a protuberant mirage of illusory poverty and neglect on the outside. On the inside, individual features spoke of a lack of fastidious hygiene: the floorboards bore stains in a variety of shapes and colors, both old and new; they had permeated the wood grains and seeped through and around the gaps. Nicks and scratches decked the wall planks. There was a heap of old firewood stacked carelessly in a corner, and on the other side of the room, pots of different shapes and sizes lay upside down, wobbling, or rolling on their sides. A thick pile of well-made fishing nets was flush against a wall. A firepot stood right in the center, an obsidian sentinel of deadened flames.

Chelsea found it difficult to believe that someone lived in here, and the longer she stayed, the more she was convinced that the shack had long been abandoned. Still, the emptiness of it ensconced the forgotten peace of isolation: the shack may be deserted, but it had a deep, inviting quality about it that held her close and yanked her back when she strayed too close to the door.

She approached the firepot with measured steps and peered inside. It conveyed indications of being used recently: there were burnt residue at the sides and bottom, and beneath it lay a pile of ash. Someone did live in here, in this little place, no matter how much its current state said otherwise.

"Shouldn't you be somewhere else?"

Chelsea whirled around on her heel, heart in mouth. At the doorway stood Denny, bearing a fishing rod, a white towel slung on his shoulder. He was tall and lanky, with lean arms and slender fingers; tight ringlets curled about his ears and across his forehead.

"Sorry," she said quickly. "I didn't meant to—the door was open and I—"

"Chill," he said, grinning. "I'm not gonna kill you or anything." He marched in and stowed his rod among the red fishing nets in the corner. He plucked the towel from his shoulder, wiped his face with it, and turned to her. "You could stay if you want, or you could go someplace nicer, which would be anywhere else on the island."

"You're not mad at me?" she asked. She hated how small her voice sounded, like that of a child about to be scolded.

"Nah." Denny gestured to one of the mats in front of the firepot and sat on one. Chelsea followed suit. "Trespassing? It's not like that's illegal or anything. Oh, wait, it is."

Despite herself, Chelsea laughed. "Seriously, though. I'm sorry."

"It's cool." He threw the towel behind him without even bothering to check where it landed. "I don't mind, really. If I wanted to keep people out, I would've locked the door."

"That's a relief." She watched as he grabbed a black bird perched on his shoulder and set it on the floor. She hadn't even noticed the thing before. "Do you live here?"

He smiled and rubbed the back of his neck somewhat sheepishly. "Yeah. It's not much, but it's something."

"I think it's nice in here," she said with honest conviction. "A little on the messy side, but it's real cozy."

"Hey, I'm a bachelor," he replied in mock outrage. "We bachelors are naturally messy creatures."

There was a question wedged between her mouth and throat. Chelsea weighed her next words with great care, phrasing and rephrasing, balancing every word, every letter with another, striving to express pleasant neutrality. In the end, she decided to be frank. "Speaking of which, what do you think of Lanna?"

Denny straightened from his slouch. He was laughing. "Aw, that's cute. Are you trying to be subtle?" He slouched again and propped his chin on a fist. "I could give you a few pointers, if you're interested. Like not being obvious, for starters."

She shrugged. "Right. Gotta work on that. So what do you think about her?"

"Got a lot of thoughts about her. Which one do you want?"

"The most kid-friendly one, if there's any."

He took a deep breath and appeared serious for once. The light from outside illuminated the side of his nose and the ridges under his eyes when he leaned forward.

"There's just no answer." He hesitated and gazed off to the side. "I mean, I like Lanna. Well enough. But I'm out for a commitment and she's not."

"What do you mean?"

"Well…" he absently scratched his chin. "She's not in it for the long run. She just wants someone for now, you know? A summer fling or something."

Chelsea nodded. "You're the marrying type, eh?"

"Hey, so are you." He grinned and relaxed again. "Besides, I like my job. Not a lot of money in it, but I get by fine. Puts bread on the table." He broke off and stared at the unlit firepot. "One more mouth's stretching it, but when the babies come? Heck, we'll be living on seaweed on weekdays."

"You're a real ray of sunshine, aren't you? Anyway, Lanna's a pop star."

His fingers tapped against his knees in a lethargic rhythm. "Your point being?"

"That she has a job," she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "She's on a break right now, but it won't last forever."

He smiled. His teeth gleamed white in the sunlight. "Look at you, trying to get me and Lanna together. Planning on switching careers, Chelsea? Matchmaking might be perfect for you."

"I'll think about it. But seriously, you both have a job. You guys could make it work. And Lanna… call it a woman's intuition, but I think she's serious. Dead serious."

"Maybe. But I want stability, y'know? I want everything planned out. Solid ground under my feet." At this, he patted the floor, as if to demonstrate his point. "And no children, not yet. Not until I have something saved up."

Children. She remembered having been afraid of discovering she had children when she woke up in the clinic. It had nothing to do with fear of responsibilities; the plain truth was that the idea held within it a potent aura, something like a spark of focused energy, that struck irrational terror and disquiet into prospective parents, like her: holding a little bundle of raw pink flesh, tiny fists, and coarse hair; this little one who would someday take up the mantle and carry her name into the next generation. No, not her name—Vaughn's.

"Yeah," she said, "I see your point. Children could be a handful."

He waved towards her. "Take you, for example. After what happened to you, I doubt you'd be pining over a messy baby soon."

"Right. I mean, having amnesia's hard enough."

He paused. The tempo of his tapping fingers rose into a canter and then stopped altogether. "Uh, yeah. Your amnesia. Right." He smiled, or tried to smile. "That's what I was talking about."

Chelsea frowned. "Something wrong?"

"Nothing," he said quickly. He rose from his seat. "Listen, I gotta split. Just remembered something I had to do. You can stay here if you want. Nice talking with you."

He hurried out the door, leaving Chelsea staring and wondering what on earth just happened.

* * *

Vaughn looked up from the cup of coffee in his hand. "Hey."

"You're home early." Chelsea closed the door behind her and smiled in greeting. She was growing fond of the unpretentious security she found in Vaughn's quiet presence; it was a thin, intransigent membrane of indifference and concern that kept the world at bay. "Did you boil some water?"

"Yeah. Check the kettle." He tipped his head in the direction of the kitchen. "Where've you been?"

The inside of the fridge buzzed around her head as she rummaged in it and retrieved a damp bag of Elli leaves. "I just sort of walked around the town," she said over her shoulder. "You know, going in people's houses and talking to them about stuff."

"Learn anything?"

She poured hot water over the crushed leaves. The liquid in her mug resembled a bog: the water was stained a transparent dark brown, bitter both in scent and taste like ink watered down, littered with bits of bracken and broken leaves that swirled along with the beverage when she stirred it. She lifted the mug with both hands and walked over to her couch.

"See, I knew you were nosy. I just knew it." The couch sank comfortably beneath her. "Anyway, Denny likes Lanna, but it's a no-go for him."

"Hm." One of Vaughn's arms was draped casually over the backrest; his forefinger consistently traced asymmetrical rings and ever-tightening spirals on the upholstery, darkening where his nails scraped it.

"Aren't you going to ask why?" Chelsea waited for a response. There was none. "Heck, I'm gonna tell you anyway." She adjusted her position and pulled her legs up. "Seems like Denny's all rearing to get married and he thinks Lanna isn't. You know how pop stars can be. And there's that thing about kids."

He frowned. "Kids?"

"Uh-huh." She sipped at her tea, surprised that it wasn't a hot as she had expected. "You know Denny's job doesn't exactly pay well, right? He wants to save something first before having kids. You know, something to fall back on when times are tough." She paused to collect her thoughts. Vaughn was leaning forward, and she could tell his curiosity was piqued. "If you ask me, it kind of conflicts with one another. Wanting marriage but not kids, I mean. It's like a package, isn't it? You get married, you have kids. Or maybe it's just me." She shrugged. "Anyway, how long have we been married?"

He frowned thoughtfully. "A little over two years."

"Two years? And we still don't have kids?"

His face froze. Every muscle in his face grew still: the corners of his mouth, the crease between his eyebrows, the meat of his cheeks, even his eyes—they lost the emollient animation everyone else's had. He might as well have been carved in alabaster, polished and burnished and carefully sanded to lifelike perfection, except, she noticed, that his jaws were working. "Chelsea, don't." He exhaled through his nose, and she watched them flare out, little flaps of flesh that moved with the passage of air. "We've already talked about this."

It was inappropriate and exceptionally childish, but a grin traipsed along her lips. She caught it with her teeth and crushed it between her molars. "Amnesiac here, remember? Care to enlighten me?"

"It's… complicated." He sighed and ran a hand across his face.

She was aware of his distress. She saw it in his rigid movements, smelled it ballooning off his skin, pulsing through the air between them. She was curious, though, and curiosity blotted empathy and unselfishness off the map. Whatever it was about children that agitated him, she wanted to know. "I'll try my best to follow."

His mouth was tight, his eyes pinched. "I don't think I'm ready for it. For children."

"What? Why not?"

It took a while before he answered. "I've been on my own as long as I can remember. I don't know how to—I don't think…" He avoided her eyes and opted to stare at the wall instead. His breaths carried the rest of his sentence through the room, languorously gliding on consonant wings with ironic lightness, streaked with the quintessential weight of torment.

"You think you're not going to be a good father," she said, finishing what he had left hanging.

He didn't reply. She caught herself thinking how much younger and older he instantly appeared, as if he were the questionable union of youth and old age personified, reincarnated into the mortal world, made flesh by the shriveled hand of fate.

"Well, you'll never know until you get there, right?" she said, trying to cheer him up. Part of herself bore signs of being drenched with guilt for upsetting him.

"Let's talk about something else. Please."

"All right. Fine." She cast her eyes around, looking for something else to talk about. There was something at the back of her head, at the very tip of her tongue, a miniscule itch that kept flinging pebbles at the surface of her mind. She snapped her fingers when she remembered what it was. "Oh, yeah. I forgot to ask: when I got bucked off by my horse, why was I upset in the first place?"

He looked, if possible, wearier. "Not sure this is a better topic." His eyes bored into hers, almost pleading silently, unseen hands clasped as if in a prayer. He sighed when she ignored it. "We had an argument. A big one."

"About what?" The small bog in her mug was cooling. She gave it a half-hearted stir.

"Trivial issues. Stuff that's been building up since day one." He slugged his coffee and set the cup down on the table. "Things weren't exactly going smoothly then."

"Oh. You mean the marriage was rocky."

"It was falling apart." There was gravel in his voice, gravel and sand, grinding and grating against each other. "We couldn't agree on anything, and we always fought. We were on the verge of a split."

"Oh," she said again, dumbly. She could imagine arguing with Vaughn, given all their differences, but almost skidding to a complete stop with divorce waiting at the end of the alley, tapping its foot—she couldn't imagine it. She didn't want to. "And then? What happened?"

"You hit your head on a rock. You know that part."

"So the accident actually helped a little?" She thought it had. Unexpected events had a way of concealing beneath their obvious masks of malice something of a more pleasant nature, just below the surface, to be discovered when a certain amount of time had passed. They were one of the ways life brought people together.

He shrugged. "Maybe. I don't know."

"I'd say it's a blessing in disguise." She reached out and touched his hand. It was warm and callused and she felt like never letting it go. "And I'm glad we're still together, Vaughn, for whatever it's worth."

And for whatever it was worth, she meant it.

He smiled. "Yeah, me too."

* * *

_**a/n:**_

_I think I need a breather. This chapter almost became the death of me. The first draft I scrapped altogether; the second I pulled apart and sifted for anything recyclable... and the third, well, the third is a very crude version of what I published. In short, this chapter is the fourth draft._

_There's a big chance that I'm not going to be able to update next week, so I apologize in advance. Merry Christmas and happy holidays, everyone!_


	6. Stirrings

**Chapter Six**

* * *

_Stirrings_

* * *

He always got up before she did. Morning after morning, as seconds ticked to minutes, as minutes stretched to hours and hours into days, she waded out of the dreams pooling under her pillow and into the realm where reality reigned, greeted by the lint-muddled view of the ceiling, whatever landscape the weather had painted outside her window—the rising sun caught and cushioned among the boughs of the gnarled oak tree, or sheets of gray rain pouring from above—and an empty bed beside her.

She had grown used to it. The emptiness, the other half of a broken whole with its smooth and tidy sheets she privately referred to as 'the other side,' was something any human could get used to, given the correct length of exposure and enough time to adapt. It had saddened her the first time, of course. The passage of time had softened the severity of its bite, corroded the poignancy of longing; the sharp edges were blunted and the bumps leveled, so the weight of emotion could be concealed behind a wall of sleepiness.

Today, though, in place of the cold sheets and the cold pillow was warmth. Warmth, and the soft sound of snoring, roiling along with the sagging of the mattress: that unmistakable downward slope that signaled the presence of another body in bed.

She thought she was still dreaming, that her mind, in its loneliness, conjured her an illusion of him lying there, sleeping all his worries away. But as she stared—that nose of his, was it genetically engineered?—the pieces fell into place with diminutive clicks, one by one; the little things that proved too rich to be a dream stood out, edges gathered in sharp angles, and like a solved puzzle, the sight of her husband beside her dropped all the pretenses of mystery and any sign of belonging in a fantasy. Of course: it was Wednesday, his day off. He had slept in.

He appeared younger in his sleep, like everyone else did, devoid of emotions and troubles that otherwise would have been there. On his back, one hand spread leisurely on his stomach, he was suggestive of a slothful vacationer lulled to unconsciousness by the lofty rustle of palm fronds. Sleep knocked down the defensive walls he erected about him and exposed, like the flesh of a peeled fruit, the timid person hiding inside, quivering in the gloom and lashing out when prodded. The dark lashes latched on his eyelids trembled—was he dreaming? She wondered what he could be dreaming about: animals, maybe, or his job, or things from his past, about which she knew nothing.

This man sleeping beside her in bed fell under the category of a stranger, or an acquaintance at most. He was a mirror, an image of herself inverted, reconstructed, trapped behind glass, existing in the present but not in the past. The future stretched forward before both of them and into the horizon and beyond, but of what lay behind nothing remained; they were strangers to themselves and each other, twins cleaved by a wall of forgetfulness.

His hair borrowed the color of the moon and stamped it down from ethereal to mortal: from glossy silver to a dull gray; strands of it brushed his eyelids, and the longer ones grazed along the curve of his cheeks. Was it natural, this odd coloring—was it the product of a mere chance, a mutated gene, the dominant yielding to the recessive after a long struggle of protein sequences, was it an accumulation of deviations to, say, turn blond into gray? Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. She knew nothing about genetics. Odd coloring was not a spectacle here, after all: that woman—Popuri, wasn't it?—possessed a head full of pink hair, and no one thought it odd. Or perhaps they did, but decency deigned it inappropriate to ask.

He shifted, turned to his side so he was facing her. This close to him, with the early sunshine shining flat on his face, she could pick out details that distance often denied her: the beginnings of crow's feet branching off from the corners of his eyes; the pores of his skin, burned light pink by prolonged reveling in the sun; an old scar, white and glistening and faintly waxy, along his chin; the little things that yanked him down from the pedestal of the gods and the rich, the human imperfections that shorn him the doubt of being carved in alabaster or marble, or even in granite.

But that nose of his—what was so special about it, what set it apart from other comely noses? To be truthful, nothing. Not the straightness of the bridge, which in itself was not altogether exceptional, nor in the ridges of cartilage at the tip, and certainly not in the nostrils that flared up and out like a woman's skirts. Nothing, except that it was his. How dramatic, she thought. How very poetic.

"Good morning, stranger," she whispered.

His eyes flew halfway open. Chelsea froze. Time, it seemed, ground to a screeching halt; even the morning birds out in their branches ceased their chirping. The sudden hush gushed into her ears, swilling in spirals, and drew a curtain across her brain: a swish of cloth down the stage and the play ended; it was deafening. The irises that bored into hers gave the impression of being embedded at the bottom of a well—beneath the eyelashes, under the hood of the lids, there sparkled the amethysts, with flecks of cloudy white around the pupil.

What would Vaughn say, having caught her staring so openly? He was her husband, and she his wife, but why did she feel as if she had violated some kind of unspoken rule, an invisible line drawn to their mutual consent? Her heart hammered in its bony cage, shriveled and wintry and fearfully supine.

She swallowed. Her throat was dry.

His eyes closed just as she was thinking of bolting out the door. She waited one second, two, three, and he was sleeping again, his breathing deep and even. Time picked up the thread of its progress and ticked the future into the present; sounds blared back to life, the curtain was lifted, and the play continued. He had not even registered her, still in the throes of sleep as he was; it was as though his eyelids had pulled back of their own volition simply to check if the world he knew was still there.

The relief that surged through her stomach heaved at her throat and blew out a sigh that was not completely hers. He hadn't registered her. Carefully, she got up and made a half-hearted effort to tidy her side of the bed. He was snoring—it was faint, felt more than heard, but it was there. Who knew that the rough timbre of a snore, nothing more than an exhalation of air, could be so reassuring?

She tiptoed to the door and let herself out, before he woke up for good.

* * *

Old photos had a way of blending nostalgia with bitterness. When she inspected those blurred faces and faded smiles, stained sepia and dimmed by time, it was as if the eyes pleaded her to save them—save them, perhaps, from being imprisoned in this piece of laminated paper, from this perpetual scene, this second stolen from the olden days and frozen for the amusement of those to come. Did these people know what lay ahead for them, how they would spend their lives and how they would die? No, said the innocence in their eyes. No, we don't.

"This one here," she said, gliding a finger over the rotundness of a woman's face, "who is she?"

Vaughn peered at the photograph over her shoulder. "Elena or something. Wait, it was Ellen, I think."

Ellen. She repeated the name in her mind, bouncing it around the membranous ravines in the hopes of striking the exposed edge of some buried memory, or finding the end of a loose string that could be pulled to unravel the shroud that ensconced her brain. No such luck.

"She looks like the girl from the other photo." She flipped the album back a few pages and stopped at a picture of a young girl in a blue frock. "See the resemblance?"

"That's her granddaughter. You know Elli, don't you?" When her face remained blank, he sighed and added, "Trent's wife. The nurse."

"Oh. Yeah, her." Chelsea closed the album smartly; dust billowed from between its pages. "This isn't working," she said. "I still don't remember much."

The truth was that she had remembered several things during the past days in leaps and bounds, transitory and indiscriminate: etching her name on the trunk of a tree, a grimy slipper carried by the river, a doll's dress discarded in a trash bin. Nothing of significance whatsoever. The process of recovery itself heralded no special ceremonies; the memories merely reappeared as if they had never left, as if a switch had been flipped, or fingers snapped. No flashbacks or flashing lights to signal the reemergence of things dead and forgotten.

"The doctor said you'll remember everything in time. Be patient." Vaughn shifted on the couch and scratched at its ratty covers. "Don't know how you sit comfortably on this thing."

"It _is _comfortable. You're just sitting on it wrong."

She tossed the album onto the coffee table where it slid to the edge, its plastic cover squeaking against the varnish. The doctor had also said that exposure to stimuli might bring back memories—songs, pictures, anything reaching back to the past, connected to the present by the ice-white gossamers of time that glittered with accrued dustings of birth and death from previous generations. So far, nothing worked.

He was still moving about the couch. Something from yesterday had bothered her all night, announcing its presence at moments when she had nearly forgotten about it, like the ache of a tooth or splinter in the toe. "I was at Denny's yesterday. I told you that, didn't I?"

He stopped shifting to listen. "Yeah. Why?"

"He acted weird." She scratched her chin. "Like, really weird."

"What happened?"

"I'm not sure. We were talking about kids, and then—wait, I'm trying to remember."

"Kids," he said, with a smidgen of contempt. "You mentioned that, too."

"Yes, I remember." She pursed her lips. "We were talking normally, and then he acted all jittery."

Vaughn was still—intrigued, as far as she could tell. "And?"

"He rushed out and left me there. Does he always do that? Because it's fishy." She grinned. "No pun intended."

He seemed to be thinking hard. "No, he doesn't. Did you say anything offensive?"

"I don't know, okay?" She smoothed strands of his hair that stuck outward and curled at odd angles; one side was flat against his skull. He hadn't even bothered brushing his hair after waking up, the slob. "I think I'm gonna pay him a visit today. Apologize or something."

He shrugged. "Whatever you think is best."

"What about you? What will you do all day?"

"Mirabelle's," he replied without missing a beat. "Things to do. Paperwork, too."

"Ah, right." She slapped his hand away when he tried to mess up what she had tidied. "Sometimes I forget the official side of your job."

The sat in silence for a while, basking in the muffled ambience of summer, inhaling the scent of grass imbued with heat from the late morning sun. Underneath the cheery façade she maintained lurked swelling lump of fear that she would never remember anything again; she was not always aware of it, but she knew it was there, squatting like a toad, appearing when she looked and hiding when she didn't—like her own reflection in the mirror.

"Vaughn?" she said quietly, in a voice soft as the flutter of butterfly wings. "Do you ever think it's unfair, how of all the people in the world, I get to be one of those who lose their memories?"

He stared at her for a long time, his mouth slightly curled on one side, as if he had swallowed something rancid and couldn't spit it back out. "No," he said. "Life deals you a hand, you play the cards however you can." His eyes narrowed, and the crease between his brows became more pronounced. "You don't complain, you don't ask questions, you don't expect answers. And you don't get to choose your cards."

"Like poker?"

"Sort of." He leaned against the backrest and tipped his head backward. "Point is, you just deal with it."

"What if I can't?" She hated it, the weakness in her voice—that thin current of helplessness under the torrent of words, parting and converging around rocky inflections, dripping through the forking cracks like stale water. "What if I can't deal with it?"

"You lose," he said. She was silent. "Everything you've staked. Your sacrifices, your efforts, everything. You lose them all."

Deal with it, or lose everything. What, though, was everything? If it included the blades of grass that bent before approaching winds, or rivers of ice winding through rocky mountains, or muddy sediment sinking to the bottom of the ocean, all the things that remained indifferent to the petty maladies of upstart bipeds that was mankind, then the stakes were high, too high, to be laid upon the shoulders of a particular individual.

If everything was just one life, though, if losing everything meant dying, if it meant snuffing the fire from a single person, a grain of rounded sand on some seashore—such was individuality in humanity, it did not exist—then the stakes were not worth betting on. One life: what difference would one life make? Snuff it out, let it live, who would notice? Plenty, or none, it was not her place to say. If the life had been shaped by festering wounds and regular bouts of self-pity, then, by all means, douse it with ale and stomp on it with the heel of a boot for good measure.

"Like poker."

Air whistled through his nostrils. "Like poker."

"Then bet all your chips on me," she said, grinning sardonically, "because I'm not about to lose this hand."

He smiled. The creases at the corners of his eyes deepened. "Now that's what I like to hear."

* * *

Summer winds smelled to Chelsea of sand and saltwater and noontime sun. The air had a definitive heaviness in its breath, picked up from forest grass and baking pavement, as if the essence of summer had been condensed and concentrated and released into the air to mingle with dust and smoke. It smelled the way fire would, if fire had a scent; the soupy texture dribbled with heated torpor.

"Oh, how I miss the good old days," Denny intoned, "when folks didn't have to ask me what I'm doing, standing at the shore with a rod in my hand."

Chelsea tromped through the wet sand stood next to him, smiling with the air of an indulgent parent. "If it makes you feel better, I wasn't going to ask."

"Of course it makes me feel better. Look, I'm jumping for joy. You really made my day."

Towering clouds with golden halos and gray bellies inched their way across the oceanic sky, like flagships of the world sailing into battle from the eastern seas. She sighed. "Sometimes I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or mean."

"Both, most likely." He cast her a sidelong glance and grinned. "Don't take it too seriously, Chels. That's how sarcasm works. How's the head?"

"Don't say it like that. You make it sound like I'm deranged or something."

"Fine, then. How doth thee be feeling, my lady?"

What was it with Denny that inexplicably lightened whatever shade of emotion people carried within themselves? Aside from the dazzling wit, of course—yes, that sharp tongue with its honeyed words dripping from the tip, suffused by glibness, carrying the blunt honesty of a hundred weary men. "Why, I feel ever so fine, good lad. I thank you a thousand times for asking."

The heavy resonance of his laugh flew beside the roaring waves with a rightness that defied suspicion, as if the waves and his voice were created to meld with each other. It was melodic and oddly sopoforic. "All right, now. What brings you to humble old me, hm?" He turned slightly towards her, so the sun leaked on his face diagonally, one half lit, the other half shadowed. "Can't be to watch me fish—too boring, even with my dashing good looks."

"I came to apologize."

"Apologize? What for?"

She stared at her feet. The glittering pattern her shoes imprinted on the sand resembled the warped surface of an oyster's shell, designed with geometric precision, from the bottom of which radiated reserved curves marshaled into a wide band. The waves washed over the prints and took sand away, leaving behind a nothing but a vague hole with frayed edges, brimming of seawater.

"You remember yesterday?"

"Last time I checked, I wasn't the amnesiac."

She rolled her eyes. "Well, last time I checked, I wasn't the one who ran out in the middle of a conversation."

"Right. And you came to apologize?"

"Yeah."

"You came to apologize to me because I ran out on you." He said this in a mildly incredulous tone; the corners of his mouth twitched.

"Yes."

"I ran out on you." He paused. "_You_ came to apologize to _me_."

Chelsea was getting impatient. "Yes, yes, that's what I said, didn't I?"

"Are you sure your concussion's already healed?" He laughed. "'Cause, you know, I think you knocked your head harder than you thought."

"I thought maybe I said something offensive."

"Well, you didn't." He turned back to the sea and whistled a casual tune. The tone seemed to be made up on the spot, the wafting notes snatched away from deep inside his imagination and hastily arranged, one after another, to form something between a melody and a noise. The notes proved to be ineffectual at carrying the tune, and it petered out eventually.

"Why'd you run off?" she asked when it seemed that he was done whistling.

"Bladder problem." He suppressed a chuckle. "Now that that's taken care of, how about a knock-knock joke?"

"And this coming from the man who offered me the secrets to subtlety. There's something you're not telling me."

"Aren't you the sharp one." She frowned, but he was staring at the horizon and did not see it. "Yes, there's something I'm not telling you. There, I said it. Plain enough for you?"

"What is it?"

His arm stretched forward, pointing to something hovering near where the sea touched the sky. "Look at that cloud over there." He clucked his tongue, apparently impressed. "Shaped like a cloud. Very rare, clouds like that. Most clouds aren't shaped like clouds at all."

Chelsea was not amused. "Denny." It was remarkable how much dissonant venom two syllables could carry, especially when the conduit employed happened to be one's own name.

His smile faded. "I know I always have something to say about anything," he said, "but there are things in this world that are just not my place to say."

The words rang true and throbbed with apologetic honesty; it took her fiery exasperation by the horns and with palliative fingers sculpted it into something leaning towards wry acceptance. Who was she to prod, anyway, when every human being kept secrets of their own? The fire of curiosity burned brighter, but she knew her place. "Oh, that's all right. I'll find out someday, stake your life on it."

They stood silent in the thunder of the waves, blue and green arcs tipped with white sea foam scalloped thickly at the edges, like nature's silken dress; walls of water rose from the basin and rolled to the shore, only to rejoin what they vainly tried to leave. Seawater lapped at her ankles.

"Chelsea."

"Hm?"

"Your husband loves you a lot." He stared at the sea and wouldn't look at her. "Thought you should know."

"Oh." The unexpected profession bound her tongue to the roof of her mouth in a bout of flustered self-consciousness, and all of a sudden she did not know what to do with her hands. Her husband loved her. Of course he did. It simply never occurred to her to consider it, or to dwell on it; she took it for granted that he had married her and she had married him. The question was whether she loved him—did she? The air bore down on her shoulders like epaulets of indoctrinated confusion, grainy and tepid and inherently heavy with summer balm. "Um… thanks. Thank you."

"No need to get all bashful and stuff, now. I, for one, don't envy you. Not even a little." Denny paused. And laughed. "Okay, maybe a little, but so little that you could say it's nothing."

"Gee, thanks for ruining the moment."

"Anytime."


	7. Plummet

**Chapter Seven**

* * *

_Plummet_

* * *

The ceiling bore signs of having been stared at for too long, at the dead of the night, when animals were raucous and tempers high. Sunlight of golden yellow deepened and gave way to a brassy brown, falling from low windows and dribbling pale squares on the floor; it seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once, like a tongue of flame hidden behind a curtain. One might say that this was caused by the spaciousness of the shop, the sheer gaps between what few windows it had, and the odd surface of the floorboards, weathered to smoothness by the constant patter of feet.

He sniffed. The baking heat from outdoors stifled the humid air inside and released, from within the grains of wood, a damp, musty odor, like that of a forest floor after a day of downpour, heady and blunt, not altogether unpleasant.

A combination of white noise and distorted falsetto blared from the radio Mirabelle kept on the counter. As far as he knew, she never turned it off—at least, it was always turned on at high volume, tuned in to the same station, every time he spent time in the shop. Usually it played songs about love and heartbreak, sometimes of death and loss, all somber and dry, leaving the taste of subjugation at the back of his throat. The song that wafted out from its speakers now came from the late 70s, or so the announcer had said; the notes alternated between extreme high and extreme low, giving the impression of a police siren.

Everything thrummed and buzzed mutely, even the air, as if the indifferent earth itself were shaking with mirth at its inhabitants, great shoulders trembling, charging the atmosphere with shocks of electricity that hummed with life. It was in the ground, in his chest, in his ears, ringing, a single unbroken note heard only during summer. It was only during summer, after all, that things peeled away their solidity and took on a gelatinous mien.

The slips of paper in his hands wound an endless string of jumbled numbers and letters, each inked curve overlapping another: purchase dates, shipping fees, order forms, prices and discounts, zeroed figures no one wanted to talk about in person.

Vaughn sighed. Neil had fallen short again, and Kana was demanding two Appaloosas to be delivered in a week.

Presently Mirabelle came bustling in, carrying a tray laden with biscuits and sandwiches and a pitcher of orange juice, on the surface of which clung droplets of moisture condensed by the cold. "Eat up," she said.

Ah, Mirabelle. Ample-bosomed and thick waisted, with strong limbs and dimpled elbows. The nearest window poured liquid amber light upon her and followed the roundabout contours of her flank—the heavy calves, up the rounded hips, the subtly bulging waist—which offered a glimpse to a distant past of the woman she might have been, once upon a time. He caught a whiff of milk and cheese whenever she moved. Motherly, matronly Mirabelle. She was the mother Vaughn never had.

"You needn't have bothered," he said.

"You're quite welcome." She patted his head absently. "You should eat more, you know."

"I'm eating fine."

"I know." A look of concern flitted across her face. "Your wife…"

"She's fine."

"But does she know—"

"No. Not yet." He breathed in the dust in the air and the cheesy tang redolent of Chelsea's barn.

"Poor thing," she said. "I would hate to be in your shoes right now."

"I'm not going to let anything happen to her again, Mirabelle."

"I know. You take care of yourself, hear?" She smiled and ambled away.

Ever since Chelsea was rushed to the clinic with him clutching her hand and telling her shakily to hold on, just hold on, Mirabelle and Julia and all the villagers started treating him as if he might fall apart at the joints at a single touch, as if he were a rag doll stapled and glued together and left in the rain to rot. He was loath to be coddled and he had told them so, multiple times, in fact, but he had been met with sad smiles and heavily scratched platitudes—but what did they know?

His found his mind wandering to Chelsea more and more these days.

He hated the moments when she would stare at him blankly, as if wondering who he was and what he was doing in her house, before locating a piece of jagged information from the drawers in her mind, shaking herself, and smiling at him in greeting. She did not know she was doing it, he could tell. She was not aware of the split-second pause and the way her eyes would glaze over and sparkle with everything but recognition; she wasn't aware of the surprise in her mouth when she looked in the mirror and saw a face she could not remember staring back at her.

She wasn't aware of the shadow looming over him, the great heaving crack in him caused by the vigilant desire for her complete recovery and the bitter dread of it.

Yes, he dreaded her recovery as much as he desired it. Feared it, despised it, even.

It stood at the horizon, the shadow, growing and swelling to bursting, waiting, as time pressed against his back and pushed him forward, second by second, no matter how much he dug his heels into the ground. Encountering the shadow was imminent. Every exit was barred, every detour closed off; there was just one way to go and it was forward. One day she would recover and remember—would she hate him again when that day comes barreling into their lives, kicking open the front door of their house?

Here was something to think about: whenever she remembered the forgotten, did she re-experience the emotions that came with it? If so, then he was right to dread that day.

The receipt for the purchase of five Shorthorns contained a fair amount of zeroes in it that bled into each other in wisps of ink, feather-fine filigrees that pulsed with every thought of Chelsea. He figured he must have been staring at it quite a while; like the ceiling, it bore the symptoms of having had eyes trained on it too long.

This was no good: he was too distracted to work and too uneasy to think. He needed fresh air. "I'm going for a walk," he said to no one in particular. Eyeing the tray of food Mirabelle had so graciously procured for him, he debated on whether he should leave it untouched or take even just one biscuit, if only to let the woman know that he appreciated the effort. What the hell, he thought. He took two and ate them as he stepped out into the street.

What was it with summer air that made it so heavy? It was the nearest thing to the liquefied essence of sloth, seeping into the backs of his eyelids and pulling them down, over his eyes and under his brows. One deep breath had the toxic capacity to draw flagrant drowsiness out from the bowels of one's mind, from the place where ideas, emotions, and inner demons huddled together like oppressed refugees, edges overlapping like smoke and water.

He found his feet taking him to the diner. Denny was already seated at one of the tables inside, morosely poking at something that looked to Vaughn like the remains of a salad. He approached the man and seated himself.

"Chelsea talked to me this morning," Denny said without looking up.

"I know."

"Tried to apologize for walking out on her yesterday. Can you believe it?"

"She mentioned that."

"I slipped up." Agile fingers topped with nails bitten to the quick tangled with dark curls. "Almost."

"Figured as much." Vaughn reclined in the chair and draped a leg over another. "How much did you say?"

"Nothing, actually. She wouldn't have suspected a thing if I hadn't up and panicked. My bad."

"She was going to smell somethin' fishy sooner or later."

"True." Denny toyed with the fork in his hands, flipping and turning it between his fingers. Its sloped sides gleamed silver in the light, glinting portentously, like a blade unsheathed from its scabbard with the whispered promise of death. Vaughn almost smiled: of all the sinister harbingers of tragedy laid out in the devil's catalog, why pick something as inconspicuous as a fork? Denny looked up and said, "Say, things are really gonna hit the fan when she starts remembering stuff, huh?"

"Bet on it."

"Why don't you just go ahead and tell her, then?"

He frowned. "How?"

"I don't know. How about, 'It's all my fault and I deserve a good thrashing?' "

"I get the point," Vaughn said.

"If you'd just stop being a jerk for once, you know…"

"I know." The air was dank, even indoors. It seemed determined to follow him about until it had permeated his entire being, until every pore of his soul had soaked up the molten lethargy, until the marrows in his bones lay dense and saturated. He decided he hated summer. "I just don't know how to treat her right."

* * *

In the house they shared, the shadow lurked. He caught glimpses of it once in a while, as sudden movements in the dark, as disfigured patches of light under tables and chairs, as a throb in his temples whenever she mentioned the word remember.

The throbbing did not resemble a migraine in the least: whereas a migraine was the sound of nails scraping on a chalkboard, the throbbing in his temples was a mallet hitting a wall; the sound it made was thick in the middle and soft at the rim, as if the blow were absorbed by a pocket of air. All force and no clatter.

It was starting to happen more and more frequently. The memories had been resurfacing days ago, she said. They would sit quietly during their nightly exchanges, a cup of coffee or a bottle of beer in his hand, a mug of tea in hers, and she would recall, with excited gesticulations, something she had remembered during the course of the day. His temple would throb while she talked. In the darkness beyond the reach of the lamp, he would catch sight of something prancing around, like a figure forever trapped in the peripheral, never solidifying into something more than a smudge that moved with the light.

It was becoming something of a shared habit, and tonight was no different.

"And I remember this slipper," she said, waving her arms as she talked, "this dirty slipper carried by the river. I don't know the place, but it's definitely not here."

He waited for the throbbing to stop. "We don't have rivers here."

"Exactly. And then there's this tree I carved my name into."

"Which would be one of hundreds."

She ignored the jibe. "Anyway, I know I was a kid then because I spelled my name wrong."

"You still do."

"Shut up." She threw a cushion at him and missed his head by a few feet. It landed on the floor, right up to the wall, directly beneath the window. Charlie padded over to it and sniffed curiously, his tail wagging limply behind him. "I did that on purpose."

"Of course you did."

"Oh, and there's this dress—a doll's dress—in a trash bin." He jolted upright, caught unawares, and she mistook it for interest. "What a waste. It looked new. I suppose it belonged to a doll I had as a child."

"I—" His voice was sore and mottled. He swallowed. "I suppose so."

The air thinned, its balmy essence sucked out of it with a revolting slurp. He found it hard to breathe. A doll's dress in the trash bin. With every beat of his heart his temple throbbed, and with every throb his vision darkened: he saw the shadow, moving along the floor, drawing closer and closer. Its fingers closed over his throat; it whispered of what was to come, of the dusky tidings the future held in store.

No one knew what lay in the future, true, though anyone could predict if they wanted to. There were moments in an era when a nobody would gaze forward and see the corner of another life peeking out of the skyline, just a little out of sight, moving closer with the planet's rotation. That was how he viewed himself: as another nobody gifted—no, not gifted, cursed was more appropriate—with the opportunity to see into the immediate future, to pick out what took shape below the line of the earth and sky, and what he saw was the hunched shape of tragedy, eyes wide and blank and glassy, shuffling towards him on lanky limbs. Too bad foresight recanted the power to stop whatever it was one saw coming.

Was he supposed to watch, recumbent and helpless, as this defaced personage of tragedy closed the distance between them and whisked his wife away?

"If only these darn memories would come back soon." Her fingers, short and slender, scrabbled on her knees. Their undersides carried a tone lighter that the backs of her hands. "I'm sick of being the only one who doesn't know things."

I know, Chelsea, he thought. I know.

And with that, he decided. The time for secrets was over. He had to tell her.

He wanted to, God, he wanted to; he wanted nothing more than to get it over with and move past it and never look back. It was nothing but a mountain of putrescent memories piled on top of another, stretching up into the clouds, poking a hole in the sky. He could climb over it. He'd climbed over taller mountains and emerged with a scrapes and gashes, stronger and older. This one was no different. He did not fear it at all. What he feared was what lay in wait for him at the top, prowling on four legs, snarling, ready to pounce at the first unfortunate visitor.

Or perhaps it wasn't even a mountain. Perhaps it was just a hill, or a mound of dirt under a tree, blown to exaggerated proportions by paranoia.

Yes, maybe she would think nothing of it. After all, it was in human nature to forget and move on.

He took a deep breath. "Chelsea."

"Yeah?"

His tongue sagged heavily in his mouth, limp as a lock of hair, lolling about uselessly, draping over his teeth and burrowing into the flesh of his cheek. Parts of his brain buzzed with everything but a good way to start. How was he to explain? How did one plunge into a conversation of nippy subjects and scalding sentences—how, except to throw caution into the air and jump at the deep end, plummeting headlong into mouth of a winding talk?

"I—"

I'm sorry for what I said. He could begin with that. If he did, though, she was bound to ask what he had said in the first place, and to explain it would unfurl the fabric of his reasoning and skew the order of events. Memories were often unreliable, heavily colored as they were by emotions and differing perspectives: which came first and what followed it, what actually happened and which ones were the amendments his memories had painted. Given the fact that everything tapered down into one thing, though—the thing that had started all of this—explaining shouldn't be difficult.

But it was. Every turn in the maze led to him being at fault. Every path, every fork in the road, every approach pointed at him and screamed guilty. Guilty as charged.

"Vaughn?"

She was still waiting, her mouth slightly agape. Her mouth, that delicate swell at the bottom lip that used to yield deliciously against his own, soft and sweet and warm, how he longed to taste it again. When was the last time he kissed her? Here his thoughts floated in disarray like mud at the bottom of a pond when one throws rocks in it. Memories were unreliable. He was certain, though, that it was before that incident, even before she had ridden her horse to crippling exhaustion; long enough, he knew, to sharpen the details in his mind: her scent he could recall clearly, the feel of her in his arms, the sound she made at the back of her throat.

"I—"

But on to the darker things. This was one conversation he could not put off. The secrets would die tonight, one way or another.

He opened his mouth. The words flew out before he could clamp his teeth on their tails; his mind swam up and out of the confines of his skull, up, like a balloon, until it pressed against the ceiling. It seemed that he was watching them, both of them, as a spectral visitor floating overhead: there he was, sitting on his armchair, she on her couch, locked in a tableau which only they were aware of. The words he heard appeared to have come out of someone else's mouth.

"I love you."

She sat still. She looked as if she had stopped breathing; even the fingers in her lap lay frozen beside each other, each one mirrored by the other. The expression on his face—the face of the one below, the one on the armchair—was that of a man who had accidentally choked on the words and coughed them out only to find them alive, wriggling and squirming, maimed with morbid expertise. He blinked once, and he was drawn back into himself, no longer the silent spectator by the ceiling. The upholstery on the armchair felt velvety under his palms.

She cleared her throat and looked away. Even in the dark, he was able to make out her dappled cheeks; splotches of color stood out unevenly and contrasted with the natural pallor of her skin. The stillness thickened and folded, amplified by the absence of light. "Let's go to sleep," she said.

Her footsteps rang out in the silence as she walked up the stairs with him watching and kicking himself in anger: he had wasted his precious chance to tell her, to explain everything before the memories come surging back to their rightful places, smug and haughty and heavily distorted by predispositions. He sat alone in the living room, stewing in conflicted emotions, staring at a spot in the floor that seemed to be a shade darker that the areas surrounding it. The shadow romped, an imp grinning, baring its teeth in savage expectation. Come what may, he thought. I won't lose her again.

It was not until late into the night, as he lay awake on his back, listening to the hushed sounds of the nighttime, that she stirred and whispered to the darkness, "I love you too."

* * *

**_a/n:_**

_Oohh, Vaughn is angsty. Anyway, I would like to apologize if this chapter seems messy or unfinished. My mind is drying up and I'm running out of inspiration. Won't be updating next week—sorry. Next chapter will be posted on the week after next._

_On an unrelated note, I've only just realized that Kirk doesn't use oars: his boat has a propeller attached to the rear. I distinctly remember writing something about Kirk using oars. Haha. It's embarassing._

_Reviews are very much appreciated, guys. I practically run on them. And coffee. :)_


	8. Thoughts

**Chapter Eight**

* * *

_Thoughts_

* * *

That morning, something halfway alien gnawed at the trappings of sleep behind his eyelids. It was a beast, invisible, solitary, all fangs and claws, pressing down on the balls of his eyes. He rubbed at them and roused vibrant bursts of stars against the watery pink; dimly, the date and time came to him, trickling round his fingers and surging through his tear ducts, garish letters typed out one by one. Friday. Today was Friday. He peeked through his fingers at the clock sitting on his side table. It said 10:12 AM. He had slept in again.

The sky outside appeared like the inside of a circus tent, low and sagging, gray all over, the creases darker than the rest. If there were clouds, he did not see any of them. It was as if a sheet of frayed cloth had been swathed over the heavens as he slept, suffocating the sun, blotting it out and holding it at a distance so the world below would freeze.

Or maybe it was that the clouds were so thick and gray that he could not see the sky they hid behind. A hand could reach out, bunch the clouds in a closed fist, draw them apart like cobwebs hanging from the ceiling, and the sky would be there, as bright and blue as it always had been. He yawned. Now that he thought of it, it was unusually cold for a summer morning.

Her side of the bed was empty. Two days in a row: he wasn't quite sure what to make of that. The sheets on her side were always slightly tousled, a wrinkle here and a fold there, half made up and half disheveled. Surprising, how someone so assiduous as Chelsea could be just as lazy—but then again, she had always been hard to predict; from time to time, unexpected traits peeped out from under her skin, little bumps of irregularity that broke endless stretches of sameness, like buoys floating in the ocean.

He felt the sheets beside him. Cold. He missed waking up next to her.

"I love you too," she had said last night. Even now, hours and hours later, through the death of the night and the birth of another day, through sleep and dreams and the muddle of both, the mere memory of the words narrowed to a sharp point that plowed into the back of his throat. Afterimages of her voice in the dark ignited a spark in his fingertips and kindled fire in his cheeks. All night he had imagined, in the thickest part of the night's darkness, her lips forming the words, the tongue pressing against the upper teeth, the vibration of the vocal chords, every action that comprised the act of speaking and the thoughts that lurched behind it.

The memory tugged at the corners of his mouth. Finally, he gave in to the inchoate urge to grin at the ceiling like an idiot. How was it possible that four simple words could reduce a grown man to a bashful youth he had been ten, twenty years ago?

The door swung open. Chelsea strode in, her clothes rumpled, her face clouded over with veins of thunder and something else, something akin to fear—a distant cousin, perhaps, an emotion that transcended the physical world, come from the realm of ghosts to haunt the living. He sat up. She was frantic, flipping open drawers, upending their contents, kicking them about with her bare feet; she grasped a saltshaker in her fist: she had been downstairs, in the kitchen, and back in the bedroom.

"What's wrong?" he said, rising. The stirrings of panic lapped at his tongue: it numbed his mouth, his hands; he was alarmed, yet he felt nothing. For a frozen second he could only watch as old postcards and keys and spare change dropped to the floor, bounced, and lay still.

"I don't know." She pawed through the knickknacks scattered on the floor, tossing them every which way. "I'm looking for something but I don't know what it is."

A used candle flew past his head and hit the wall. He knelt beside her—something sharp dug into his knee—and touched her shoulder. "Hey. Calm down."

"I can't. I can't think." Pens clattered, papers rustled. Inkbottles rolled, their contents spilled. She was shaking, wracked with tremors that wobbled along her palms to her fingers, jumping from a nail to another. "My head's about to burst. I can't take it anymore."

He touched her cheek and turned her face towards him. Lines gorged between her eyebrows; he smoothed them with his thumb. She closed her eyes. "Look at me," he said.

When she did, tears gathered into a film over the irises, ready to spill at the next shudder; he saw his face reflected in her eyes, grotesquely bloated into a spherical monstrosity, a white mask with five gaping holes. Her lips trembled. "I don't know what to do, Vaughn."

"Look at me." She obeyed. "Take a deep breath."

Clumps of hair stuck to her forehead and the sides of her face. There was a cold stone in the pit of his stomach, gyrating in a spiral and collapsing in on itself, growing ever smaller and more weighty. Its surface was flaked; chips of gravel parted from it and travelled through his throat into his voice. They slashed the air with sandstone talons, speckled empty space with gaping wounds that bled panic. "That's good, you're doing good. Keep breathing. In, out."

Puffs of warm breath from her mouth curled into his cheeks; her trembling met a wall and steadied itself; the film of tears in her eyes was reduced to a transparent satin glistening along the lower lids. Soon she was breathing normally.

He helped her stand up and lie on the bed.

"I'll make you tea. Stay here, okay?"

She nodded, eyes closed.

He picked his way out of the objects scattered on the floor—he would deal with them later—and hurried to the kitchen. As he went down the stairs, two at a time, ignoring the beginnings of worry writhing at the space at the back of his ears, he thought he saw a shadow close behind, following him, laughing quietly.

* * *

She had fallen asleep when he got back.

The tips of his fingers brushed the strands of her hair, tangled and slightly damp, and paused at her temple, hovering like a mother bending over a lost babe. Somehow, sleep managed to mop up the puddles of her tears and eat away at her agitation until only exhaustion remained beneath the rubble. If he were to divine the movements of her lips, decipher the crease between her brows, translate the trembling of her fingers, give voice to the dumb tension churning in the air around her, would he see himself there, as he appeared in the mirror, or was he filed away with the other minor details she could not be bothered with, neatly packed into a box and labeled, to be shelved and never again opened?

I love you, I will never hurt you again, stay with me, please stay. Words are meaningless if they never reach their intended recipient. Words are intangible, like ideas; they do not travel from one mind to another, they are not shared through glimpses in the hallway, not in tender caresses that brush away grief, not in the mute bombast of one's feelings that no one else could hear. Words are supposed to be spoken. He had the voice, sure, but not the courage to use it.

Wishes are the same—meaningless, empty, worthless tokens of intent, made only as if to say that it's the thought that matters. No, the thoughts never matter if the thoughts never make it out of the skull. The actions matter.

Her breathing evened out and deepened.

Even asleep, her face held no trace of peace, nor of the drowning blankness of someone waddling neck-deep in hushed dreams. If only he could wave a hand over her brows and incinerate the demons tormenting her—yes, that was the word he wanted. Incinerate. It was a word brimming with molten sulfur, bubbling over with the fires of anger, of distress, of strained emotions and tears that soak pillows at night. Incinerate the demons with the same fire they lived in. The thought was saturnine in its cruelty, delightful in its irony. Demonize the demons, persecute the persecutors. Roast the fiends in flames that snap at their heels and coil round their legs, sear them and revel in their cries until the fire dies down and the wind blows their ashes away.

How morbid, he thought. Am I turning into one of them? One of what—one of those demonic manifestations of sorrow perched on one's shoulder, whispering of temptations and sinful urges, of pain and macabre glee?

Sorrow, sorrow. There had been nothing but sorrow since she lay there in the hospital bed for the first time, crying and wringing her hands, begging reality to melt into a dream so she might wake up and make everything all right again. And then she hit her head on a rock and found herself in the same hospital bed with her mind wiped clean and her sorrows forgotten.

But there is no cure for sorrow. Time is nothing but a balm that stoppers blood, knits the wound, and dries the scar. Time numbs the tissues and sinews and mends the skin, but the wound remains, invisible; the pain, or the ghost of it, hovers beneath the crust, put to sleep by the ticking of the clock. Indeed, he could almost touch its essence, feel it simmering along her skin, seeping out of the pores on her arm and tickling the underside of his fingers, quiet and dormant, stirring only to remind her of its presence, to send her teetering on the verge of insanity, looking for something she did not know.

"When you remember," he said, quietly, almost shyly, "will you hate me?"

He left the tea sitting on the side table. It would probably be tepid by the time she wakes up, but he decided to take the chance that she would drink it anyway.

He went down the stairs, paused at the landing, took three steps up, hesitated, shook his head, ran a hand through his hair. The panic that had numbed him now numbed his brain as well: it trickled through his veins, up his arms, past the heart with its four chambers beating in earnest, up to his skull in which the diluted machinations rusted over and, like a poorly oiled door joint, creaked to an iron halt.

The thoughts that flashed and sizzled at intervals grew more and more disconnected from one another, disjointed and broken like a message buried in static. He thought his brain, the organ itself, in all its grayness and spongy glory, had finally decided that it had done enough and now was the time to retire. Thinking became a punishment: not painful, but terribly disorienting.

In the place where his heart used to be lay a block of ice which shivered from its own chill.

He gripped the banister and closed his eyes. "I can't think," he remembered her saying. "My head's about to burst." Makes two of us, he thought. The emptiness, made starker by the complete absence of thoughts that usually blared nonsense and crept over one another, was deafening, blinding, numbing. It piped a shrill note that pierced the barriers of thoughts and feelings. One less thought and his mind would implode into a million pieces, and then who would pick them up and put them back together?

Stupid, he was being stupid. How many days had it been when he thought he had too much on his mind? Now, ironically, he could think of nothing—it was worse, he now knew, than thinking of everything.

He had to see someone.

* * *

Though she would never admit it, Julia resembled her mother more than anything; it was almost eerie, almost horrific, how much they looked alike, as if Julia were the original and Mirabelle were a clone, aged and inflated and allowed to fade. The eyes were the same, as was the mouth with its tightened corners, the arched eyebrows, the straw-colored hair—but most striking was the frown they shared between them. Brows furled, eyes pinched: somehow the frown had been passed intact from mother to daughter, called up with fierce ease during arguments and executed without flaw.

It was the same frown that Julia presented him now as her eyes—cornflower blue, like Mirabelle's—took in his state. He had made sure to do all the things Chelsea usually nagged him about: combed his hair, straightened his collar, tucked his undershirt. Anything to make himself look halfway presentable.

"You look horrible," Julia said. She stepped aside to let him in. "What, did you forget to sleep or something?"

"Actually, I overslept."

"Could've fooled me." She gripped his shoulders and sat him down firmly on a chair. "You idiot. How many times have I told you to take care of yourself? Goodness knows, Chelsea has a lot to deal with without her husband dying of starvation—"

"I'm eating fine."

She wagged her finger at him. "Don't interrupt me when I'm talking."

"Yes, mother."

"Stay there. Don't move a muscle. I'm getting you something to eat."

"No—Julia, wait."

There must have been a drop of urgency that leaked into his voice, and she must have picked it up, for she turned back and asked, gently: "What's wrong?"

"It's Chelsea. She…" He hesitated. What would he say? Chelsea—what? Chelsea went ballistic on him?

"Vaughn." Julia was serious now, staring at him with unwavering calm. He knew better, though. "Tell me what happened."

"She… she was panicking. Looking for who knows what."

"Looking for what? Didn't she tell you?"

"Said she doesn't know what she's looking for."

Julia shook her head and chewed on a fingernail. There was once a time when Mirabelle had thought, even hoped, that he would marry Julia, and he was inclined to think that maybe both of them had even expected it. But the chance to deepen the friendship passed them by with the two of them watching, idle and indifferent, and the chance never came back—if it did, they had already sunk too deep into the roles of motherly sister and her unrelated brother, too comfortable to look up and see the chance peeking at them through the window, with the curtains around its face.

She took her hand away from her mouth and smoothed her hair with it. "That's… weird. Did she say anything else?"

"I don't know. Maybe. Can't remember."

"You know, I'm really not the right person for this, but do you think that maybe she could've been looking for, you know…"

"You think she's looking for it?"

She glared, and the bloodline frown made its way to her face. "Her. Chelsea's looking for _her_."

"Whatever."

"How is she now?"

"Sleeping."

A strand of curled hair fell into one of her eyes. It struck him, not for the first time, just how beautiful this woman was. Every curve, every slope of her face seemed to have been planned out in advance and made to meet perfectly, so that every detail on the left was mirrored on the right without so much as a hint of asymmetry. Yet for all her human perfection, this beauty put him ill at ease, as if at the slightest increase in temperature the face would soften, melt, and drip down onto the ground. It was, he knew, the reason he let the chance fly by. She would laugh at him if she found out.

She shook her head again and sighed. "I… I don't know, Vaughn. Maybe it's time you told her. You know, about everything."

"You think that would help?"

"No. Not at all. But at least it's better than letting her remember all by herself."

What difference would it make? Either way, the chances were that she would hurl him away from herself as far as possible and keep him out of arm's reach, and no one would blame her for doing so. "Maybe."

* * *

A sense of foreboding followed him about all afternoon, chilling the air it touched, gripping his elbows with reedy fingers. It snapped and crackled like a bonfire, opaquely transparent; it fled conscious vision yet impressed upon him its presence whenever he blinked, during the exact moments right before the upper eyelid touched the bottom: as a blur of lights, or smoke in the wind, sometimes a darkening that had nothing to do with the sun. Was he being haunted? He did not believe in ghosts, except for those of the past many try to escape. But yes, he was being haunted—by his own thoughts and fears, by imaginary shadows, images painted by emotions, by colors and smells and sounds, empty shells of memories.

In the late afternoon light, the farm, viewed from afar, resembled an impressionist painting: light and shadows in exaggerated contrast, every hue bright and undiluted, the fine points smudged and neglected in favor of color. The barn's stale brown planks appeared to have vivified into a cheerful red. Even the grass that had paled before the sun now took on a verdant liveliness, and the fence which had been bleached bone-white seemed to regain its original coat of deep russet.

It seemed to him that the world and everything in it had conspired to appear cheerful—to burst with patches of color—simply to spite him and his leaden feet; life had a sense of humor, they said, and it was not always easy to laugh when the joke's on you. But then again, why would the world bother cloaking itself in primary colors just for him? He reasoned that, since even at this moment Life was toying with him for petty entertainment, there was no reason for it not to stoop even lower and pick on him on a closer scale, as if he were some interesting new specimen under a microscope: he would not be surprised if, as a result of some unforeseen chain reaction, a humpback whale materialized out of thin air and dropped on him, all seventy-nine thousand pounds of blubber and meat and whale bones.

That would kill him in an instant, though. He suspected that if he were to die, it would be done slowly, dragged through the sea of time to be battered by the winds and the waves, dangled within schools of fish to be nibbled at for years and years until nothing remained.

Charlie ran up to him with his tail up and wagging from side to side. Vaughn bent down and gave the dog an obligatory pat on the head, and then opened the door for both of them.

Chelsea was waiting for him in the living room, standing beside her couch, her back ramrod straight. Her hair had been combed and gathered into a knot behind her neck, and the way she carried herself hinted at gradating recovery. There was something strangely intimate about the sight of her nape: pale, slender, curved with sweet purity; it was something he did not see often and thus seemed to thrust a violation of privacy under his nose whenever he did. The look in her eyes, though, chilled him—they were cold, flinty, detached. From the corners of his eyes he thought he caught sight of dancing shadows, but they bled into the backdrop whenever he looked at them directly.

"You're up," he said, foolishly. "How do you feel?"

She took a deep breath and crossed her arms. All the while, her eyes remained cold and distanced. Smile, please, he cried in thought, hoping she would hear. Smile. I'm begging you. When she spoke, her voice was thin and even, as if it were pressed with a flat iron until it lost all depth. "Enlightened. Hurt. Guilty."

"What—" The gangling arm of a sudden realization reached out and strangled his voice halfway out of his throat. What do you mean? he wanted to ask. But he didn't have to, not at all. For in that instant, the world proved to him that, no matter what he believed in, words could be shared through a single glimpse; in a single glimpse, her eyes told him of three words louder and clearer than any voice could: _I remember everything_.

* * *

**a/n:**

_How is it possible that I could waste three thousand words on a chapter in which very little even makes sense and almost nothing happens? Haha. And why is it that Vaughn's chapters are so much angstier than Chelsea's? I swear I never do it on purpose._

_Thank you to all who reviewed, from the bottom of my heart. Your comments always make me smile. Cheesy, I know, but what the hey. Thanks for reading. :)_


	9. Tears

**Chapter Nine**

* * *

_Tears_

* * *

A woman's heart is a fragile thing, full of hairline cracks lining the surface, pulsing blood with every breath: one brush of heartache's bony cheek, a sweep of its tear-stained cloak, and the cracks would crumble, widen, part like gasping mouths from which pain gushes out, to trickle its way out of the eyes as tears.

But the tears didn't come.

Pain is a needle, a thousand needles, the sharpened edge of a knife, the poisoned tip of a spear. Heartache is a different creature altogether—mellower, she thought, and harsher in its mellowness—that sprouts from pain's side, like an extra limb that has a life of its own, bearing the twin branches of love and hate farther up where the limb forks. Pain stabs swiftly, repeatedly; heartache is subtle and deceptive: it drags and scrabbles and wrings, with cruel deliberation, sweating of longing and melancholy, until it resembles pain. At least pain is honest.

Chelsea would have laughed at the face of pain, had she felt it under different circumstances. Her heart, be it a woman's or a man's, or something in between—a transitional oddity, her late mother would have said—it was many things, but fragile was not one of them. Stubborn, yes, and gentle sometimes, often sentimental, but never fragile.

Something had weakened it, something that had already broken hundreds and thousands of hearts before hers—those of sisters, of daughters, of mothers. That thing had seen her, regarded her with a shrug, a slight tilting of the head: Another heart to shatter, it must have thought, if it could think. Just another heart to shatter.

Vaughn's face was pale, his cheeks ashen where the sun struck it, his eyes narrow and wide at the same time: a trick of the light, she supposed, something to do with the way light slanted from the window—it threw shadows longer than their objects and gave a jaded appearance to the most innocent things. He stood frozen by the door, thinking, unmoving, unblinking, as if the feeblest flutter of his eyelids would pull the world down onto itself to collapse in a smoking heap.

She imagined frost creeping from his feet to his legs, winding around his arms, closing in on his neck. There was a phrase she was looking for—that was it, yes, a deer caught in headlights. The headlights, certainly, was Chelsea. She would have honked her horn to startle that deer, or stepped on the accelerator and ran over it, the car bouncing and tipping as the bones crunched under the tires. She would have done so, if her heart were fragile.

"Are you—do you—" he began, then cut himself off.

She glanced at her hands clutching at the couch's backrest. They were pale. Everything seemed paler today. The islands were leeched of color, even missing pieces that she knew should have been there, as if someone had rubbed a cosmic rubber eraser at the earth's surface until bits of creation came away with it. It would not come as a surprise if, somehow, somewhere in the world right now was a hole burned through the ground due to the rubbing. If someone fell in that hole—someone walking with their head up in the clouds, dreaming of heaven—would they plummet straight to hell? What a horrid way to die.

She would like to take that eraser and erase her husband right where he stood.

No, that was a lie. If he were taken from her, she would shake her fist at the world, stamp her feet, shout and tear at her hair until he was returned. She loved him, every part of him—only right now, she didn't. When he still kept silent, she spoke.

"You threw them away," she said, in a voice that was dark at the tips and faded at the edges. "Everything she owned."

His face creased—he looked older, more tired. Still, he didn't move. "Please, let me explain—"

"Explain what? That you never wanted her?" If only one could massage life back into a voice the way one massages life back into an arm that has fallen asleep. She swallowed. "That… that you didn't even care when she died?"

"She was never alive." He bit his lip as soon as he said it.

In an instant, she felt the pain rise and titter. The scales tipped to one side; the tears fell. This, she knew, was not pain, not really—it was heartache, come swooping from above, its cloak billowing. "How dare you." Whatever emotion this was, it stung. "How dare you."

"Listen—"

"No, _you_ listen." The upholstery on the couch bore white nail marks where she had gripped it. "I know you never wanted children. To some extent, I understand that. But—" Here the heartache and the pain danced and gamboled, juggling their knives, "—she was our daughter. You weren't there for her. For me."

The baby's cry, the one nobody had ever heard, ghosted along her bottom lip; she flicked her tongue out to catch it, but it wasn't there—she tasted air and the saline scent of dripping tears. "The doll's dress," she said, "the one in the trash bin. It wasn't a doll's dress, was it?"

He shook his head, slowly, as if the frost that had chilled him started thawing at the neck and he found it stiff to move. "I just—listen." Even his voice gave the impression of powdery ice and crystal stalagmites. She shivered inside. "I'm sorry," he said.

Sorry! When a mother loses her baby, and when the father was never there during the entire pregnancy, during the day of birth, when the place where he should have been standing was filled in by someone else, is sorry an adequate word for consolation, even by standards so low, they don't seem to exist? She wanted to shout at him. She didn't.

A doll's dress in a trash bin. She could remember it now, clearly, the way it had lain among the beer caps and broken rubber bands and banana peelings, the sleeves blackened and the ribbons still red. The scalloped lace on the skirt had eyelets pierced at regular intervals, grimy white against the multicolored backdrop of jumbled discards.

It seemed to her that she would see that dress whenever she closed her eyes, and that her subconscious would pick it out of any milieu, draw thick black lines around it, and whisper, There it is. Her hands curled into fists; she wanted to hit him, to break that straight little nose of his, watch the blood trickle onto the creases of his mouth, down to the chin: a thin line of glistening red, sleek as a strand of nylon, gathering into a bead at the bottom. Would he hit her back, if she hit him first? No, he wouldn't—she knew it for certain, but even if he did, it didn't matter. Anger demands satisfaction; pain satisfies anger.

"I hate you."

He looked down at his shoes. "Because I threw her things away?"

"Yes."

"I had to. It's been too long—you have to move on."

"Because we're better off without our daughter, right?" The anger bubbled up to her throat and seized her tongue. "Good thing she died, isn't it? Less strain for you."

He flinched as if she had slapped him. She wished she had. "I wasn't thinking when I said those—"

"Damn right you weren't." She sniffed. The tears began to fall faster, shoved out by the anguish swelling inside. Was it so wrong to mourn for her daughter, to cling desperately to whatever was left of her—even a dress that she had never had the chance to wear?

Chelsea had loved that baby from the start—when it was still in her, when it turned and squirmed and kicked inside her belly, when it broke out of the womb curled, bloody, blue around the lips, filling the room with dreadful silence instead of a newborn's thoughtless cries.

She remembered—and how bittersweet that word now tasted—the widening of Elli's eyes when she held the baby as if it were a grenade without a pin, as if it would reach out any second and start crying if she clasped it as steadily as her hands permitted. It never did. "I'm sorry," she had said. "I'm so sorry."

Her eyes shot up to Vaughn, who was watching her in the half-light. He was gauging her, measuring her up, trying to see whether she was emotionally stable—she knew this because he had started when she looked up. She felt sorry for him, too, but the anger loomed over sympathy and devoured it, bones and flesh and all. Maybe she was imagining things, but she thought she tasted the metallic tang of blood in her mouth.

It was difficult to think, what with the various emotions clamoring to be heard. There was pain with its sharpened knives, heartache with its gripping claws, sorrow with its scorched toes and frozen tears, and underneath it all, hunched in a corner with its head sunk deep between its shoulders, was guilt.

It wasn't his fault the baby had died, but it didn't keep her from blaming him.

She wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. "I need to think," she said. "Have to—have to think."

She pushed past him into the late afternoon sun; he made no move to stop her. The air swilled around her shoulders, carrying the sea's breath on its wings. Everything was pale pink where she wasn't looking, as if her eyes were permanently covered by a fold of transparent eyelid, as if she were viewing the world through closed eyes.

The emotions that had wrung her insides jerked anew, yet she could not feel them anymore. Sensations, she realized, resembled shards of ice: sharply cold in small doses, numbing in huge quantities. Her emotional capacity took in more than it could hold, and the anger, the pain, the guilt, the heartache, the sorrow, the longing, all those abstract things without faces that smile or frown, did to her heart what a block of ice does to a hand that has held it too long: blunted it right to the core.

Thoughts do the same to the brain.

While she walked, she did not knowingly plan on where to go, but somehow, her feet and her mind meandered deep within the shadowed thickets of thought, surrounded by the twisted brambles of ideals, and came upon the same patch of light on the ground: there was only one place to go, one place where she could think of everything and nothing in resolute balance.

* * *

Time seemed to grow more and more sluggish each time the waves broke. The sun should have set by now, yet it was still there, half submerged in the ocean, its reflection broken into slivers of glittering orange, the pieces softly undulating, like a disc of brittle light demolished by the waters. The sea shone with the color of the sky: a shade of blue so tainted by purple and orange that if you stared at it and closed your eyes, the inside of your eyelids would be painted the same color.

Time is another deceptive force governing this world: no one sees it, yet everyone knows it's there, in the shadows, under bridges, in dikes and ditches and cracks in mirrors. It trudges forward on sore heels, slowly, dragging the hem of its robe behind it, yet when you turn your back for a second you'll find that time has taken a running leap and you've been left behind, your hair streaked through with white and your face sagging, wondering where the years went.

Vaughn had told her once that time does not exist. She hadn't understood him then, and she still didn't now, but he never explained what it meant. Maybe she would ask him, after they got past this spat. If they ever get past this spat.

She swallowed. The back of her throat felt as if she had gulped down a lock of her own hair.

"It's late."

She turned her head to the direction of the voice. Natalie strode over to where Chelsea sat at the edge of the island and plopped herself down with a sigh. "Just got done with the shipments," she said. "Pierre's still at the diner, doing chef stuff. You know the guy—it's like I married cooking when I married him." Her face was vivacious as she talked, crinkling her nose and raising her eyebrows, sometimes even puffing her cheeks to highlight a point.

"Oh, he's not that bad." Chelsea swatted at a mosquito that buzzed in front of her nose. "On the upside, you get to eat good stuff at dinner."

"The downside is people think he's your son," Natalie laughed. Her laughter sounded like breaking glass: high, tinkling, melodic in its own way. "It's sort of unnerving sometimes. One time, Pierre and I took Luc to the city and the people there thought they were siblings. Can you imagine?"

"Sort of. 'Oh, how adorable! Are they yours?' "

Natalie laughed again. Chelsea noted the straightness of her teeth, and the way her eyes crinkled at the corners. Somehow, the angle of the sun's rays made them appear wide and narrow at the same time—just like the way Vaughn's eyes had appeared a while ago. "Yeah, that's exactly what they said. City folk. Luc spent the whole day calling Pierre 'big brother' instead of papa. It's ridiculous." She wiped the tears from the corners of her eyes. "Anyway, how's your husband doing? Still has womanly hair?"

A second of relative silence passed. "He's… fine."

The woman caught Chelsea's hesitation and grew serious. "Something wrong?"

"No, not really. It's a good thing, actually. A really good thing."

Realization gradually dawned on Natalie's face, and with every second her mouth morphed into a minute O. In the diagonal light, her eyes were darker than her hair, in which sunbeam wrapped itself around and picked out the red in the strands and made them burn like fire. "Ah."

Chelsea shrugged. "Yeah."

Both women were quiet for a while. Chelsea stared at the waters swirling in eddies within the craggy rocks below. The island seemed to be holding its breath, elbows tucked in, with the ocean lapping at its neck. She looked to the sky, where the first stars of the evening twinkled to life. In this part of the world, on the other side of the curtain that divides the passing of time, the sky hung so low that it gave an impression of being within reach; if she stretched out and swiped a finger across the heavens, the stars would part from the clouds and cling to the finger like so much glitter.

The turmoil of emotions and her darkest thoughts fled hand in hand, straight into that place beyond the margins of reality, where war and peace are two fingers of the same hand, where time is an infant that lags behind and doubles back on itself, where seasons never pass, where everything has a name that nobody knows. A lightness of the spirit took hold; it severed ties with the baggage left behind by the past. She felt free—if numb could be considered free.

She cleared her throat. Just before things got too awkward, Natalie said: "So… you remember everything now?"

"Not exactly everything. There are some blanks here and there—you know, stuff that's not hard to fill in. But yeah, mostly everything."

"That's got to be hard on you two."

It took her a few seconds to form a sentence. "I feel betrayed. By him. By everyone. No one even told me…"

She heard Natalie draw in a deep breath. "Chelsea, you've got to understand. Here in the islands, we know our place. We couldn't warn you even if we wanted to."

"Because it's not your place to say?"

"Yes."

"Denny said the same thing."

"It's some sort of an unspoken rule. A custom or something. Don't stick your nose where it doesn't belong, Gramps always says."

"I get where you're coming from. Still, it would've been nice to receive some kind of warning. You know, steel myself for it, cushion the blow, lessen the shock."

"Yeah, I get you. Sorry."

Chelsea stared at the rocks below, at the sharp edges, rows of dark teeth pointing up. The whole arrangement was suggestive of a shark's jaw, breaking out of the waves to lunge at her—she'd seen sharks before, but never one that actually tried to attack. She took a pebble and lobbed it down. It bounced around before splatting into the water. If she jumped, would she break her neck? "The thing is, if lightning has struck you twice, you tend to prefer not remembering."

Remembering the memories, the lifting of the fog that had clouded her mind, was a shovel that dug up old scars and reopened them, slitting the stitches and carving up the wound. Beyond the borders of mourning lay a chasm of reprieve, and in order to let go, she would have to trek through the black plains and take a plunge at the edge. At the bottom, there at the bottom, sparkling like a lost earring, was freedom's hopeful face looking up.

"Oh…" Natalie looked down. "I'm sorry. I didn't realize… I mean, I thought you were only mad at Vaughn. I didn't think…"

"It's okay. It'll pass someday."

"I'm a mother too, you know." Natalie laid a calloused hand on Chelsea's shoulder. "I couldn't even begin to imagine losing my Luc. Whatever you may think, there's someone here who understands."

Motherhood brings to most a sense of quiet fulfillment: the warm perception in the lower stomach caused by having created in this world something so pure and untainted by sin. To others, it brings despair. There are those to whom it only means one more mouth to feed, one more stomach to fill, one more hand to guide, one more scraped knee to kiss, one more head of hair to ruffle, one more set of feet pattering around the house. To Chelsea, it had brought joy, devastation, tragedy, and now, a friend, all rolled up into one neat package and left on her doorstep, like her own version of Pandora's Box.

Chelsea smiled. "Thanks, Nat. You're a gem."

"Garnet, if I do say so myself."

"Sure. Garnet, then. What am I?"

The woman pondered on it, a hand stroking her chin. "A diamond. No, wait, too cliché. Let's say you're a… well, let's just go with amethyst. Matches Vaughn's eyes."

"Fine with me. An amethyst in the rough and a garnet with a happy family."

"Someday, that amethyst will have a family of its own. Trust me."

"I do," Chelsea said. "Say, about Lanna and Denny…"

"Oh, don't even get me started on that."


	10. Forget

**Chapter Ten**

* * *

_Forget_

* * *

Here in the darkness, in the dead of the night, without light and shadow to play around the cobwebbed corners of the ceiling, he started questioning his own existence. It may have been the aftereffects of the day's events, but to him, the darkness was not so much a simple absence of light as a sentient creature lodged in the center of the triangle: neither solid, nor liquid, nor gas. It was the sort of darkness that neutralizes odors and deafens people who lie awake while others sleep: thick, droopy, with the viscosity of blood and the consistency of cold cream, seeping through the gaps between floorboards, spreading out, flattening, taking on the shape of the room and everything in it.

Here in the darkness, he realized that silence could be heard, and numbness felt.

He wondered whether his eyes were closed, or whether they were open without seeing anything. There was nothing but the dark when he waved his hand in front of his face, nothing but the dark when he craned his neck to glance at where the window was set in the wall. Nothing but the dark and silence.

This was the exact moment when he started thinking, Am I real? Deprived of sight, of hearing, with nothing at hand to sniff, his consciousness started ebbing away at the center, gnawing outwards, until he almost fooled himself into believing that _he_ was the darkness, and there was a recumbent figure there on the couch, buried under a thatch of frayed blanket.

He touched a fingertip to his eyelid and pushed it upward. Now there was no question whether his eyes were open; one of them was, and the other was a Schrödinger's cat: open and closed at the same time until the daylight breaks. Still, he saw nothing.

This time, he wondered whether his thoughts safely roamed within the confines of his mind, or whether he was talking to himself. Of course, he couldn't hear anything; that was the problem—he couldn't hear his own thoughts. Experimentally, and a little sheepishly, he mumbled a half-swallowed "Ah." There was no distinction at all: a part of him was cemented on the fact that he had opened his mouth and vibrated his vocal chords, had felt his lips part and his chin dip, yet there was another portion of him that steepled its fingers and argued that the word sounded like a thought, that it rang between his eyes and not in his neck.

He shifted a little and cushioned his head with an arm: there were extra pillows upstairs, but he daren't disturb Chelsea in the middle of the night.

Ah, yes. Chelsea. No matter how much he steered his thoughts to the profound, to the mediocre, even to the pointless pondering of the night's darkness, they still found a path to her unblocked by warning signs, like ships in the night following the glare of a lighthouse.

Again he brought his palm to his face and this time immediately detected the waft of breath from his nostrils. He freed his arm from under his head and grasped one hand in the other, feeling individual fingers, groping along the forearm, tracing familiar contours to convince himself that he was not disembodied—that he was still himself, still intact, still trapped in a casing of meat with its structural support of two hundred and six bones, two arms, two legs, ten fingers, ten toes. Reality seemed to dissolve when submerged in the darkness. His fingers brushed against the hair on his forearm. Reality, fantasy—if both felt the same in the dark, both would feel the same under lights, even the ones so bright they blind twice as much as the darkness.

A patch of orange appeared at the top of the stairs and ate away at the black around it. He squinted at it. The light quivered, flickering in circles, throwing out shadows of the handrails onto the living room floor, diagonal bars trembling: black, orange, black, orange, like a decorated pedestrian crossing.

This train of thought petered out and vanished as the light burned brighter and descended a step; it brought first a bare foot, luminous as a lamp, then another, followed by the hem of a pair of pajama bottoms—the light, being tainted orange, made it impossible to tell the color of the fabric. One foot stopped at the third step from the top, the other still resting on the second, heel up, toes down.

He wished she felt the same as he did. Was her heart pounding away in her mouth, like his, was her stomach knotting itself into a fist, twisting itself into a rope, was she falling inside herself, scrabbling for something to hold on to?

He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, she was there, standing beside the couch, holding a candle aloft—the very same half-used candle she had tossed the morning before. He had not had the time to feign sleep, and even if he had, he doubted it would fool her. The whites of her eyes glowed yellow.

"Can't sleep, either?" she asked. She placed the candle on the coffee table and sat on his armchair, her knees pulled to her chest.

"Ever tried sleepin' on your lumpy couch?" He stirred and sat up—lying on his back while she sat made him feel helpless for some reason.

In the penumbral light of the candle, he caught her smile. "It's not lumpy. You're sleeping on it wrong." She yawned. "Dark in here."

"Maybe 'cause it's hours after midnight. Maybe."

There stood a wall between them, woven of self-conscious denial and the pathetic imitation of normalcy, the crisscrossing threads dusted over with a mutual attempt to delay the inevitable. They would talk about normal things and keep on talking until one of them slips, unguarded; until one fails to curb the tongue and lets out a word, shooting out to tear a hole through the wall, ripping the fabric—and the pretense will drop like marionettes with their strings cut off.

He let the pretense drag on for the moment; it would crumble soon enough.

"You're a lot like Denny sometimes. Anyone ever told you that?"

"Just you. And Mark."

There were purplish circles under her eyes, circles like bruises on an overripe fruit. Remnants of a nightmare shed from the night. "He's telling the truth. You and Denny, you guys aren't so different."

"Everyone's not so different from everyone else, when it boils down to it."

"Maybe. But you and Denny, you guys see the world through the same set of eyes."

He turned this thought over in his hands, marring its underside with a tracery of amusement. Two people seeing the world through the same set of eyes: he pictured him and Denny sharing a pair of binoculars, a lens apiece. "Poetic. But that's where the similarities end."

"Both of you are horrible at singing. And dancing."

"Ouch."

"And you both don't like kids."

And so the slip was made, the wall blasted apart, the pretenses scissored away. The air and darkness mingled in drops and vapors and slivers of curling smoke, fingers intertwining, molding together until it became impossible to tell one from the other. He breathed in darkness, exhaled light. He saw air wafting away from the flame, air and darkness, liquefied in the tip of the fire.

"Look," she said. "Vaughn, we… we need to talk."

"We're already talking."

She sat there, curled like a fist, forehead furrowed and eyebrows furled, eyes lustrous from under the shadowed brows. Her mouth was set in a hard diagonal line, lifted where she chewed at the lip, showing a thin strip of gleaming teeth. If she only knew—if she had even an inkling of how chatoyant she seemed to him, she might have taken it in her head to start mewing.

The feet showing below the hem of her pajamas were pale: fish-belly white, heavily veined blue and purple and green, wide, splayed flat, big-boned. Toes bulbous and crooked, pointing up. Certainly far from Sabrina's dainty feet, or Lanna's sandaled soles, or Julia's shapely ankles sheathed deep in her leather boots. They were farmers' feet, strong and calloused, made for endurance and heavy work—ugly, and beautiful in their strength.

"You know what I mean." She closed her eyes and opened them again. "Did you even love her?"

"She was my daughter too."

"So you did."

"Yes."

They say eyes are the windows to the soul. Hers were double doors, four inches thick, leading into the bowels of her mind, into twisting hallways and dead ends and rooms with locked doors, into darkened basements and half-forgotten attics. Doors that were always open, doors that closed only in sleep. His were mere portholes, shuttered and curtained, boarded up with planks of wood nailed together in haste—she had told him so, once, when she was still prying him open with her fingernails. ("You're a well-hidden soul, you know?", "Either that or I don't have one.")

"You weren't there when she was born. You never even saw her."

"Yes."

"Tiny thing." She held her palms apart as if to show him how small it had been. "Bloody, hairy. Wrinkly. Ever seen a newborn? They're ugly. But she was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen." She twisted a lock of hair from her shoulder and put it in her mouth; it slashed a dark crescent across her face, a stringy twine creeping from her temple down to the corner of her lips. "Were you upset when she died?"

"Yes."

"But you never wanted her."

"No."

She looked beautiful in the candlelit, with her face so animated and contoured almost lovingly. It was as if the light came from her and the flames borrowed it to burn the wick and blow a dark line of smoke straight up. "Could you do me a favor?" she said. "It's not hard, I swear."

"Shoot."

"Monopolize the conversation."

Beyond the candle, at the fringed edges of the light's golden crown, was darkness deeper than the one behind his eyelids. It was darkness within darkness, black within black, a great stirring beast concealed inside the dearth of the sun. A sack of darkness in a whale's mouth.

Now where did that thought come from?

His elbows dug into the flesh above his knees. A corner of her mouth, the one with the crescent's tail in it, lifted in a half-smile. "Please."

He sighed. "All right." Her eyes were sad. Chatoyant. Double doors four inches thick. "Thing is, when you grow up without parents, you grow up without any idea how to be a parent." He paused. He was never one for melodrama. "Puts fear in you. It follows you. Reminds you of the things you never had, things Mum an' Dad should've done. Things that now are yours to do. All the dramatic questions: the what if's and all that." He unclasped his hands and spread his palms. "What if I die and leave the children behind? What do I do if the little guy cries and doesn't want milk? What if I drop 'em down the stairs 'cause they flail too much?" He laughed. "All those stupid questions."

"You never had much trouble with animals."

"Do animals need me to look up to as they grow up?"

"Good point."

The sun was shining on the far side of the planet, where people hurriedly jabbed at elevator buttons pointing up, glided buttered knives back and forth across toasted bread, strode on the sidewalks patting their pockets for wallets they left at home, lifted a foot to inspect a grimy pink gum stuck to the bottom of a shoe. People unlocking the day with yawns and stretches, people frowning over their salads and poking at their steaks and sipping at their cappuccinos. People who would never know that on the opposite side of the world, where the moon bared its waning face, in some backwater group of islands, there were two people wide-awake in the middle of the night, sitting in the half-light, talking in murmurs, in whispers spat from the corners of their mouths, waiting for dawn to split the sky.

"Animals aren't as fragile," he said.

"How much did you love her?"

He frowned—what an odd question. How is love measured? There is no scale engraved on the surface of the heart, like a beaker's, measuring every drop of affection until it fills up and overflows; nor a ruler extending both ways, down into the earth's belly, up towards the sky's maw, how high will you jump, how deep will you dig; three fingers deep for a fling, four for something serious, all five fingers for commitment; a kilogram or two on the scales, tip the plates to whatever is heavier. He had an answer, though.

"Enough to miss her a bit."

"A bit?"

"Considering that I never even saw her, that's a lot."

"I think you'd have made a great father."

"Sure. 'Cause all great fathers miss their children's births."

"There you go again, acting like Denny."

A time of silence passed. Silence, he now realized, was not the absence of sound; silence teemed with sounds unheard, sounds so loud no one could hear them, sounds that blare and crawl and squeeze, sounds that tingle along the nape with ghostly caresses, sounds that whisper in the tongue, billow in the skin, pirouette in the nose, sounds that impair the ear.

He wondered if darkness was the same.

"What's it going to be, then?" The pink tip of her tongue darted out and moistened her lips. The eyes below the arch of her eyebrows hardened into tempered steel twice folded, sharp enough to slash away at the weavings of time itself.

Three fingers for a fling, four for something serious, all five fingers for commitment. All five fingers of her hand, and he was in the palm, amidst the grooves in the skin, balled up into a wad with his eyes half-open and his limbs lashed back. She was the fire and he was the wick; she burned him and grew brighter, consumed him, feeding off his heart, lighting up the darkened corner of himself where sweeter things had lain forgotten. Dramatic. How poetic. And what utter nonsense.

His eyes longed for sleep—a quick nap, a brief plunge into a state of blissful unthinking, a stretch or two on the floor and a few unconscious snores.

But she was watching him with eyes that glowed yellow in the candlelight. Double doors four inches thick, leading into a room locked from the inside.

In the end, it all tapered down to the middle, to the fork in the road. Left, keep going. Right, start over. Left, right. Stay or go. Else just stand there, waiting for a third option that might resurface somewhere in the hedges if you look hard enough, or wait long enough, or pray too much.

But there's no third option, no middle ground, no gray to buffer the collision between black and white. With us or against us. Stay or go.

That was it: Will they end this circus of a marriage, or will they keep at it until the circus disbands, the animals released into the wild, the ringleader in his waistcoat and studded jacket, hanging up his battered whip?

"I'll pack my bags and leave at the first light," he said.

Her mouth dropped open, and the candle flame flickered. "What?"

"I'll move out if that's what you want."

Now her upper lip curled up in disdain, lifted by the sides of her nose. "How—how could you even think—" She let her head drop into her hands, let out an agitated groan, and pushed herself off the chair. "You idiot. You stupid, selfish bastard."

Without knowing it, he was on his feet, matching her stance. He had no clear memory of standing up, or of his feet hitting the floorboards; it was as if his mind had been torn to glutinous pieces, disintegrated, and scattered all over his limbs, so that his hands and feet were self-aware but he himself was not. His mouth, without his permission, said: "What?"

"How could you assume that I'd want you out?" She bared her teeth as she talked—how savage, he thought. How ferocious. And how beautiful. "Why did you even think I married you? I love you, you bastard. How could I throw you out? It's like you don't even know me. Or maybe it's you who wants to leave."

It took him a while to comprehend the words. "What? No—no, no. That's not it. I just thought—"

"That I'd be too proud to forgive? Is that it? You automatically assume that we can't come out of this intact because Chelsea's so high and mighty and—"

"No, listen. Listen to me. I just—"

"Just what? Just thought you've had enough drama to last you a lifetime? I wanted us to make up and get over this, and you just had to go ahead and assume that—"

"Will you let me finish?" he said. She clamped her mouth shut and crossed her arms. "I don't want to leave. I just thought—I thought you'd be better off without me."

Her eyes widened. Double doors, double doors, double doors. "What in the world gave you that idea?"

"I don't deserve you. There you go. Plain and simple." In her angry outburst, she'd gotten one thing right, though: he'd had enough drama to last him a lifetime. All these touchy confessions and emotion-charged exchanges went straight to his neck.

"You do," she said. "Otherwise we wouldn't still be here, arguing about something that shouldn't have been this big anyway."

Not knowing what she meant, he offered his silence.

"I mean I shouldn't have been pregnant." The candle flame flickered again, dancing to the melody of unfelt drafts from the window. The room darkened momentarily. She wrapped her arms around herself. "It's… it's all my fault. I stopped taking pills. That's how it happened in the first place. I stopped taking pills and I never told you."

Inside his head, between his ears, a wave of vertigo passed: something inside himself was falling. Something alive and panting was falling, arms flailing about, shouting in a voice no once could hear. Ten, twenty, thirty feet down and still at it—an endless fall, an earthbound dive, to the bottom that did not exist, hurtling deeper and deeper.

"I know."

"You know?"

He shrugged. "Yeah. Figured it out pretty early."

The expression on her face was puzzled, her eyes guarded. "You knew? All this time?"

"Yep."

"And you let me put the blame on you?"

He shrugged again, and this time smiled. "I'm a great guy." It was a risk, making a joke in a conversation where every word could go both ways. A single nod could turn left into a road paved with ivory and silk, or veer to the right, where the essence of words are wrung out and collected in a pail and fashioned into something altogether deadly: poison, maybe, or a guillotine made into a word.

"I—I don't' know what to say." She put a hand over her mouth and talked through it, through the fingers. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

The crickets outside chirped their mating calls. Her shoulders started shaking, but there were no tears—not yet. The way she was dressed infused a vulnerable veneer to the air around her, what with her oversized shirt all rumpled and creased, and those motley pajama bottoms frayed at the hem. She looked like a child somebody had lost, come looking for help.

"Hey," he said, walking towards her. "Come here. Don't cry."

His arms found their way around her, around the pointedly familiar body alienated by a brief stretch of forgetfulness. She was warm in his arms, neither soft nor delicate, her face pressed to his neck. He felt her lashes brush against his skin whenever she blinked.

"Are you crying?" he asked.

"No."

They stood in silence, holding each other, swaying slightly. The fingers of his hands plunged into her hair, enmeshed, fingers and hair, in the dark held at bay by the candlelight. A woman might say it was romantic. A man might frown and puff on his cigarette and say, Well, what are you waiting for?

"If I gave you permission," she said, "will you leave?"

"Do you want me to?"

A brush of her eyelashes. "No."

"Then no."

"Do you want to?"

"No."

They had always gotten things wrong. The bullet never hit the mark, the arrow never found its target, the ball always danced around the rim of the basket before dropping away. It was always the small things: forgotten allergies, minor preferences, cats or dogs, boxers or briefs. The things they'd gotten right were all but a cracked brick set into the wall of the things they'd gotten wrong, surrounded by hardened mortar that crumbled at a breath.

In the face of all the faults, though, they had plowed ahead, because the point of marriage is to keep trying and trying until they get it right. One day they were bound to hit the vein of gold, pickaxes ringing, Jackpot, Here it is, We found it, Finally.

"We're going to be fine, aren't we?" she said. She blinked, slowly. "We can pull through, can't we?"

"We've gone this far. I say we take our chances."

The person inside him was still falling, the wind still whistling past, the world a blur, the hollow ground spreading out to catch him from below. But when she blinked once more and smiled and said, "I love you," the falling stopped: He finally found something to hold on to.

* * *

**a/n:**

_Sorry for taking too long to update. My wisdom tooth was polite enough to say hi this week. Ever tried writing with a toothache? It's harder than it sounds. lol._

_Anyway, this is the last chapter. Or rather, the second to the last—there's just the epilogue to go. The story somewhat ends here, because I honestly have no idea what to write for the epilogue, but I'll make it up as I go along, as usual. Or they might not be an epilogue. I haven't made up my mind yet. Haha._

_Thank you so much for all your wonderful reviews. I want to reply to individual comments, but I'm painfully shy both in real life and on the internet, and I could spend a quarter of an hour or more staring at a message I'm too nervous to send. But I would still like to thank you all: all who reviewed, who read, who stuck with this story 'til the end. Thanks so much, guys._


	11. Epilogue

**Epilogue**

* * *

_Hey, Stranger_

* * *

The sea, to me, is only the sky reflected, inverted, and melted into water. It's the sky on earth—something you could actually feel slipping through your fingers. If there are clouds up there, the sea would have them, too, in the same places as the ones above, only more blurred and less recognizable; it's like a fogged-over mirror that keeps moving even in the gentlest winds. Or an earthbound twin, denser and uglier.

I feel sorry for the sea sometimes. Then I remember that there are living things in the sea, but none in the sky. Then I feel bad for the sky. But there's nothing I can do except stare and stare.

So I stare at the sea.

* * *

I like walking. Many people do, I suppose, but what I do isn't much of walking. Sometimes I just stand in a single spot for a very long time doing nothing. I don't look at anything in particular, and I don't even think—you'd be surprised at how peaceful it is when there are no voices in your head, those little voices that pretend to be thoughts; the kind that you won't know aren't yours until you start talking to them. Small doses of solitude are healthy.

There are also times when I just stare. I could go on and on staring at things. I think people don't put much time really seeing what's around them. They just glance at this and glance at that and go Hmmm without appreciating the beauty hidden to those who look but don't see.

* * *

Today I'm staring at the sea. It's what I do every day, except right now I'm not standing and my mind isn't blank. And Denny is with me.

* * *

People think I'm on a break from performing, but the truth is I don't want to perform anymore. It feels better to sing when there's no one to hear me but me, and when I stop and listen very carefully, I could sometimes hear the silence singing back.

* * *

I don't know how to describe Denny. Nor can I define exactly how he makes me feel. For example, I could say that he's tall, and that he's lean, and that he laughs a lot and makes sarcastic comments and takes special solace in solitude. But if I did, it wouldn't be Denny I'm describing: I would be describing the person he wants people to see, which would be part of him, too, but flattened out, pressed down to the essentials, the things that matter the most stripped away.

I could also say that he makes me feel happy, or that he infuriates me from time to time in the most wonderful ways, or simply that I'm in love with him. But that wouldn't be enough. I could be fussy if I want to.

* * *

I think September is romantic. Even the name rings faintly of a soft sweetness, like wind chimes on a lazy day, or the wet ring on a polished table left behind by a glass of iced tea. November is orange, December is white, but September is romantic.

Even I don't always understand the way I think.

* * *

"Cold out," he says.

"It is."

"Winter's around the corner."

"I like winter," I tell him.

"You like everything."

* * *

There was a time—this being many years back—when I fell off the stage singing an aria for some tragic opera. I had been invited to perform, and I said yes right away. So that night I was wearing a corset and a heavy-skirted gown and a pair of blue gloves and a stiff wire crinoline and a big floppy hat, which were very difficult to move in; in the middle of the song I accidentally tripped on the skirt and went tumbling down the stage in a rustle of skirts and taffeta. It was embarrassing, and sometimes when I think of it now I turn red and hide my face even if no one can see me.

I managed to get up and dust myself, the stagehands grabbing my shoulders and asking me if I was okay, if I was hurt, if they could get me anything, miss, talk to us, please. I couldn't talk. I could only stare at the audience, at every face, realizing for the first time that they were people, and that they have homes waiting for them, children, maybe, or work at the office, in a printing press, in a glove factory.

A woman stood up. I thought she was going to leave. But she didn't—she started clapping, slowly at first, and then quickening as others stood to join her. Soon everyone was on their feet and clapping. I was receiving a standing ovation for tripping. I finished the song with a smile.

That's how he makes me feel.

* * *

"Not fishing?" I ask him.

He shakes his head. I like his nails. They're always neat, filed down to the quick. "Got a good haul yesterday. I can take it easy today."

"You always work too hard."

"There's no such thing as working too hard when you love what you do," he says.

* * *

If you throw a sheer handkerchief into the air, it wafts slowly downwards, tipping, edges splayed.

That's how he makes me feel.

* * *

I stare at the horizon. From where we sit, the world is reduced to horizontal lines stacked on top of another: a slab of deep blue for the sea, and a lighter one for the sky, marbled with white for the clouds. If I could see the shore, it would be a thin line of tan below the deep blue. But I couldn't see the shore without turning back; we're sitting on the pier. Light blue, dark blue, gold: the world's nautical flag in miniature.

I want to sail with the world, hand in hand, across the universe. Just me and the world with no people in it, with the stars around us twinkling their last rays. And Denny, too—I want him with us.

* * *

This little thing that happens when you leave a book open and the wind blows and rifles through the pages—that papery rustle of a perfect cream arc, pages turning one after another, one side thickening and the other thinning—that's how he makes me feel.

* * *

Seagulls circle overhead, noisy white specks in the sky raining feathers from above. They remind me of the squiggly things in your eyes that float away when you try to look at them directly. I don't like seagulls, but Denny does, so I tolerate them.

I start humming an old song, and Denny whistles along. It's a nice feeling, this—knowing that I can still make music for when that day comes, that day when my voice dies with the seagulls.

"Are you gonna sing again someday?" he asks.

"Yes, but only if there's nobody listening."

"Will you let me listen?"

"But you're not a nobody."

"But I am."

"Not to me."

* * *

Am I making sense? I don't make sense most of the time. I've never been good with words. I'm a singer, but I don't write songs. It's my job to sing songs written by other people; in a way, I'm their living mouthpiece. Turn your heart inside out like a sock and spill the contents onto paper, and I'll sing the words for you, for the whole world to hear. And that special person might catch her name somewhere in the melody and clasp her hands and say, I feel the same way.

* * *

"I caught a trout yesterday," I tell him.

"Nice. What'd you do with it?"

"I released it back into the ocean."

"Kind of you."

"I caught it again afterwards. It's a stupid fish."

"Well, it's just a fish."

"It reminded me of myself."

"Oh? How so?"

"I never learn."

* * *

My hands are small and pale compared to Denny's. They are so sickeningly dainty that when I put on white elbow-length gloves, it hardly makes a difference. The fingers remind me of plain birthday candles, the tiny ones with rounded ends where the wick shoots up. They are what you'd call the hands of someone who doesn't have to lift a finger for a glass of water—which is true, or at least, it used to be, back in the days when I had people to do all sorts of things for me.

Denny's hands are large and rough, like sandpaper, the skin at the palms thickened by fishing rods, and his fingers long and skinny with knobby knuckles. If I look hard, I could make out dark hairs growing at the base of his knuckles. His nails are smooth and rounded, a little yellowed at the tips.

Still, I like his hands better than mine.

* * *

I look back over my shoulder. Little kids play in the sand, shrieking, making sandcastles, splashing water at each other. It's much livelier here now that there are more children around. I like children.

There's Charlie who hasn't quite outgrown boyhood yet, and a sweet-faced little boy with abnormal gray hair—Chelsea's first, I should think—and Pierre's clone Luc who cries a lot and laughs a lot, and a tot who looks so much like Lily but has blue eyes, and Sabrina's twin blond girls. Julia's daughter is too young to run around at the beach, so she isn't here.

"I like children," I say to myself, but Denny hears it.

"Never pegged you as the type." He looks over at me, frowning a little.

"What makes you think that?"

"Oh, I don't know." His mouth stretches in a grin. "Maybe because you never play with kids. And your hands were shaking when you held Julia's baby."

"That doesn't mean I don't like them." I don't know why, but what he said annoys me.

"I don't steal. Doesn't mean I don't like stealing, does it?"

This annoys me more. "Stop it," I tell him. "You're being mean."

He laughs and shrugs and looks out into the distance. I hate it when he teases me—I'm not short-tempered, but when it comes to him, my emotions become unstable, wobbling from east to west. He could make me laugh and cry in the same minute. That's why I said before that I couldn't aptly describe how he makes me feel, because it's too complicated to describe.

* * *

When I think of home, I think of Denny first, and my house on the beach second. I don't know why that is. It's as if my mind doesn't know what home means anymore, and it simply points to the biggest thing that occupies my thoughts and labels it 'home.' I bet that's it: either I don't know what home means anymore, or I finally know what it truly means. If Denny hears this, he'd never talk to me again.

* * *

This will sound silly, but these days I often find myself wishing I could trade places with Popper. I wonder why that is.

* * *

"Why are you still here?" I ask.

He laughs again. I like his laugh. It's deep and unforced, and raw, like the waves. "If you're trying to get rid of me, you've got to try harder than that."

"No, I mean in this place. In the islands. Why are you still here? Nothing's keeping you here."

"Got some good toilets here," he says, his face oddly solemn. "Do you know how hard it is to find good toilets out there? Harder than Calculus and Philosophy's love child. Don't tell me you don't appreciate the toilets. They have feelings too, you know."

He's teasing me again, and I scowl at him. He grins.

"You really don't' know?" he asks me. I shake my head. He frowns and says: "And here I thought you were smart. I stay because of you, genius."

Now this takes me by surprise and I feel my heart beating away in my throat. I hope I'm not blushing. "Me?"

"You. What would you do without me?"

Something starts growing inside me, right beside where my heart is. It's warm and liquid and fills me up and pulls my mouth wider and wider and I know I'm smiling like an idiot: that kind of smile that makes a person look uglier instead of making them look nicer. But I can't stop smiling.

"You mean," I say, in a voice that hardly sounds like mine, "you mean you love me?"

The question startles Denny, and the look on his face is the look you make when you open the fridge and take a carton of milk and realize it's spoiled. "Hey, don't get ahead of yourself," he says. "I said no such thing."

The thing that inflated me bursts and sputters. Now it's dead, and I finally stop smiling. I feel very stupid. "Oh." It's the only thing I could think to say. "Oh. Of course. I was just… just, you know, joking." I smile to show him so.

His face grows blank, but his eyes, I see, are smiling. Eyes couldn't smile, of course, and I don't know why I think they're smiling, but I know they are. That's just how I see things.

* * *

As a child, I watched a cartoon where a woman sat on a boat floating on a river. She just sat there and stared at the sky and the clouds whose bellies bulged out like pregnant ladies'. Then she heard waters roaring and realized too late that the river led to a waterfall, and as she fell, her life flashed before her eyes: the things she'd done and the things she should've done, the things she never did and the things she never should've done, all flashing before her, like blinking neon signs on a roadside, as she fell towards the mist and rocks below.

That's how he makes me feel.

* * *

I think I'm just about ready to cry, but I don't cry. I can be strong when I want to.

"Hey," he says, gentler this time. "Listen. The earth revolves around the sun, doesn't it?"

I don't see the point in this question, but I'm sullen and in no mood to argue. I nod.

He smiles a little. "But the earth doesn't go around yelling about it, does it?"

I nod again.

"Because everyone already knows it revolves around the sun and it doesn't have to say the obvious, does it?"

Suddenly he starts making sense. I look at him, but he just has this little smile on that tells me nothing. Still, the thing that inflated inside me and died stirs and stands up, and starts swelling again. It reaches my fingertips and makes them tingle; it's like I touched an electric socket and the current still runs through me. My throat feels tight. "Are you saying…"

Denny clears his throat and looks at the horizon, where the deep blue and light blue meet in a line. "I'm saying that the earth can't talk." He laughs. "Planets can't talk. Silly you."

He's joking again, but I see in his face the full meaning of what he said. I hold it in my hand, in both my hands cupped together; I keep it in a broken cabinet in my mind. I feel like I can jump into the air and fly straight up. I start laughing and crying at the same time—I told you he makes me feel complicated. "You—you mean little thing." I find it hard to talk like this, through tears and laughter, but he seems to understand what I'm saying. "You have a way with words, don't you?"

He smiles and takes my hand in his. "Well, this mean little thing's spent years bottling them up. Now stop crying—you look ridiculous."

This makes me cry even more. But while I'm crying, I'm also laughing.

That's how he makes me feel.

* * *

_Fin._

* * *

**a/n:**

_I don't know why I wrote the epilogue like this. To quote our narrator (who accidentally remains unnamed the whole time, but you know who it is): "Even I don't always understand the way I think."_

_Thank you, all of you, for reading, for reviewing, for generally supporting the story and sticking with it all the way. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart._


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